Branding Israel

Research has shown that a very limited, in many ways distorted, image of Israel and its people has been allowed to shape the standard perceptions in the United States and other Western countries.

This is in part because of the relentless circulation of a false view by Israel’s antagonists. It is also in part because of media outlets that find pictures of armed Israelis in uniform and of a concrete wall between Jerusalem and Bethlehem - and, let it be said, of black-clad bearded men in prayer next to the Western Wall - to represent the “typical” Israel. And it is in part because the friends of Israel and those making Israel’s case have not been fully conscious of the problem or of ways to address it.

Drawing upon the research and counsel of professionals tuned in to the cutting-edge concepts of nation branding, Israel, led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is currently engaged in a process aimed at addressing this problem. It is a process that many groups, including Jewish Federations in North America and their umbrella body the United Jewish Communities, see as having significant value in multiple arenas.

The process has not gotten underway without hearing from critics ranging from a skeptical former Foreign Ministry official (see Zvi Mazel in Ynewnews ) to a scornful al-Jazeera commentator (see Sheikha Sajida in al-Jazeera column of March 26, 2007. ) Most of the criticism reveals misunderstandings or distortions of the purpose and methods of the branding practice - some of that stimulated by the nomenclature of “branding” and by the fact that the practice emerges from the world of advertising and public relations.

Israel’s branding plan has been challenged for seeming to ignore the need for the country and its supporters to continue to engage the arguments of its adversaries and to directly take on a propaganda campaign aimed at vilifying Israel and at undermining the very legitimacy of the Jewish State.

For those whose view of Israel is not hostile, the approach is seen as simplistically if not embarrassingly failing to confront serious issues. Unfriendly critics mock the Brand Israel process as a blatant attempt to manipulate the consumer-public into “buying” an image of Israel aimed at deceitfully hiding the nation’s destructive practices and evil nature.

In fact, the branding process is in no way meant to slight the ongoing need to directly challenge the arguments of Israel’s adversaries while actively engaging in an issues-focused mode of advocacy. Branding is meant not to replace but to supplement that approach - and to do so in a fashion that, rather than distorting reality, is at its core utterly reality-based.

Deeper reality

What might seem to be an unlikely source of elucidation of concepts on which the Brand Israel approach can be said to be based, knowingly or not, can be found in the views of Immanuel Kant. I refer in particular to his notions of Verstand (Understanding) and Vernunft (Reason,) especially as popularized in the English-speaking world by the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle.

Consider, for example, the passage in Carlyle’s epoch-defining essay “Characteristics” (1831,) which proclaims: “The healthy Understanding, we should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons but to know and believe.”

In his preceding sentence, Carlyle says: “As in the higher case of the Poet, so…in that of the Speaker and Inquirer, the true force is an unconscious one.” Applying these concepts, it can be suggested that, while charges regarding Israeli “apartheid” can be rebutted by logical arguments disproving the accuracy of such terminology, the impression of Israel that branding is meant to reverse is of a harsh, brutal land whose residents are unwelcoming and utterly without feeling.

This perception would be best countered not through rational discourse but through an appeal to the unconscious that, poetry-like if you will, puts the perceiver in touch with the human element of Israel and thus discloses a deeper reality.

It might sound like quite a stretch to cite such concepts when talking about a project that is working through the contemporary media, a project whose implementers at the moment consider it an achievement to have lined up a photo shoot of Israeli women for the pages of an American magazine like Maxim. But when the experts working with the Foreign Ministry talk about trying to somehow capture the “essence” of Israel in language and image, this, I would suggest, is what their work is indeed about.

The impact of branding is conceived as long-term and is not supposed to fully register all at once. But as Israel continues to make its case in the arena of public opinion, it also makes great sense for it to project a truthful image of itself in the arena of public perception. The time is thus now ripe for replacing the prevalent limited images of Israel, not with alternatives that are false, but with something that is true, that effectively captures the transformative experience of a first-time visit to Israel and replicates the eye-opening and soul-touching impact of such a visit.

Other countries engage in nation branding to advance trade, tourism, and the like. For Israel, while those may be useful results as well, they do not frame the basic intent. To return to the framework of Carlyle and the German philosophers who inspired him, material ends like those are secondary for the Brand Israel effort.

At its core, it has the higher goal of enabling its audience to really “know” Israel and to connect with its ultimate reality. That is a goal worth aspiring to both for the general populations of those countries to which Israel is reaching out, whose sympathetic connection is so important, and also for the Jewish community, and especially its younger generations, whose connections with Israel are of such centrality for the future of the Jewish people and cannot be taken for granted.

These, then, are some of the characteristics of our time which the Brand Israel effort is tuned into and addressing. Neither petty nor perverse, as its critics and mockers would have it, it is a significant effort with the goal of advancing true understanding of the Israeli reality and meaningful connection with the country and its people.

Michael C. Kotzin is the Executive Vice President of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan, Chicago