In the Jerusalem Post, Ruth Eglash concedes that Israel is “losing the fight” in public relations and that traditional hasbara no longer works. One reason is the demographic threat of the internet. This is very similar to what former State Department director of policy Anne-Marie Slaughter said at J Street, Everyone on twitter just asks me about the Palestinians. Eglash:
However, what continues to be starkly apparent to me as I interact widely on social networking sites is that traditional hasbara, or the set of arguments used in the past to defend Israel’s right to exist or explain its right to act or react, is becoming less and less effective or believable.
One of the possible reasons for this could be put down to sheer online demographics. A recent study in Israel, which was funded by Google Israel and carried out by the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS) in Rishon Lezion, showed that while in a general sense Israelis are highly connected digitally, their online activity seems confined to mere socializing. The study showed that the majority of Israelis using social media were in their teens or pre-teens and most preferred their activities to be in Hebrew – not very useful for making Israel’s case to the world.
Additionally, statistics show that Israel is only 44th on the list of global Facebook users, with some 3,486,520 using the social networking site and only roughly 5 percent of the country appearing on Twitter, a platform used more for social action.
In contrast, an Arab Technical News Gateway report from last month shows that the overall number of Arab users on Facebook worldwide has already surpassed 43 million, and on Twitter, it’s more than 1.3 million.
Wrong Eglash – the truth is right in front of your eyes, but you’re making up excuses.
It’s not the number of arabs using social media, it’s that fact that hasbara is one lie after another.
In the Jerusalem Post, Ruth Eglash concedes that Israel is “losing the fight” in public relations and that traditional hasbara no longer works. One reason is the demographic threat of the internet.
The problem with propaganda and narrative control is when the other narratives happen to get out – and the internet is that vehicle. It is easy to maintain hasbara as an effective tool if narratives are managed. For instance, in television programs, you can bring in Palestinians like Walid Shoebat to provide the illusion of context. Have the program stocked with AEI and WINEP members for “two perspectives.”
The problem is that people like Phil, Judt, Blankfort, Rosenberg, Horowitz, and Greenwald etc. have cracked many ethnic portions of Hasbara (think antisemitism as a means of silencing), and Gentiles like Cole, M & W and others have punched through in other ways. The role in the internet in the transmission of these viewpoints is hard to overstate.
With these narratives gaining a wider audience, Hasbara and its method of propaganda through narrative control falls flat. Hasbara has always relied on narrative control as a significant portion of its means to be effective. Simply exposing context breaks this method of propaganda and reveals it to be a narrow and dogmatic point of view.
What the heck are the zionists gonna do, annex the internet?!
I still maintain that the biggest foe of Apartheid israel is not Iranian nukes, but the internet.
the trajectory of israel’s image has consistently plummeted proportionately with the rise of the internet over the last decade and the only thing that will change that is a change in policy.
it’s not primarily demographics. truth is colorblind. it is because truth rises and bullshit sinks.
traditional hasbara no longer works
we’ve been saying for a long long time change the policy not the delivery. israel puts all their energy into better lipstick and expanding the shades available. what they fail to realize is no amount of lipstick will change the pig. the occupation is a pig and people know it’s a pig. get rid of the pig.
i really don’t get why they do not understand this is not a framing issue. it’s the policies!!!!!!!!!!!
Indeed, it’s the availability of articles, essays, journalism, reporting think-tank documents and ever increasing Youtube clips and television network footage. An important point one author mentions is annotated in a footnote which leads to an elaboration from another author quoting a different source verifying the same material. Furthermore, since the neoconservative public relations Iraq War disaster, perhaps the public at large are more likely to be mistrustful of what passes for the truth when it comes from the mouths of media icons such as Richard Ross, Shimon Peres, David Aaron Miller or Niall Ferguson. The hasbara talking points, formally issued to American Zionist bloggers several years ago, have bypassed their shelf life end date, but continued to be bandied forth ad nauseam. The no nonsense Facebook generation is more than Arab demographics its everybody…..