Read The Idea of Israel Online
Authors: Ilan Pappe
The choreographer Noa Wertheim won it for her piece
The Birth of the Phoenix:
‘In her work this artist has stressed the links between a man and his environment, in the same way as Zionism stressed this association.’ The piece is ‘an eco-dance, updated and in tune with nature – as is Zionism’.
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Thus Zionism is not in fact the theme in this piece, but the artist had no problem in its being characterised as such, inasmuch as a 50,000 NIS prize is a hefty sum in Israel.
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The playwright Pnina Gery also received the prize for a play titled
An Eretz Israel Love Story
. The play was exported with a slight change to the name,
An Israeli Love Story
. It is a tale that erases any trace
of self-criticism of the post-Zionist variety. The love story spans the period from the Holocaust through the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the war that Israelis call the War of Independence. There are hardly any Arabs or Palestinians in its chronology of the first three years after the Holocaust in Palestine. As in Theodor Herzl’s utopian Palestine, they appear once – as Bedouins who bless the arrival of the Jews. In Herzl’s novel it was a grateful citizen of the Judaicised Haifa; in the play it is a sheikh in the northern valleys who calls the settlers ‘my brothers’. The narrative and background resemble those of the early Zionist theatrical productions about the 1948 war. Here it appears as a war of liberation against inexplicable Arab barbarism, and is meant to be a depiction of heroism against all odds. The metanarrative is fed into the play through news bulletins that tell the ‘true story’ of what happened in Palestine between 1945 and 1948. A worthy play indeed for the annual Zionist art award, and again an indication of how the idea of Israel was domestically marketed.
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Then there is Zionist film. The singer David ‘Dudu’ Fisher, a cantor who became a pop star in Israel (and on Broadway), has ventured into Zionist documentaries, the most recent being
Six Million and One
(2011), which, through a personal story, concludes that only the State of Israel could have been the answer to the Holocaust. The film was nominated for the 2012 Ophir (the local Oscar) Award for Best Documentary. Noam Demsky of the Ma’aleh School of Television, Film & the Arts, Jerusalem, received 40,000 NIS in 2013 from Minister Livnat for a film called
The Strength to Tell
, which seeks to communicate ‘a new sense of relevancy of the Holocaust and its lessons’.
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In 2012 the composer Doron Toister received a prize for his Zionist musical piece
We Are Your People
. One can assume that there was nothing Zionist about the music, the arrangement or the composition, so the award must have been given for the title. Appropriately Zionist poetry is now to be found in a new journal,
Meshiv Ruah
(Fresh Air), devoted to ‘national religious poetry’. There is also a Zionist plastic art, it seems. Yoav Ben-Dov and Serjio Daniel Chertko won a prize for their piece
In the Spirit of Hope
. ‘This work was particularly pleasing [for the ministry]’, wrote the critic Alon
Idan, cynically, in
Haaretz
, since ‘it constantly fused the Star of David and the national anthem, “Hatikva”, in their work’ while broadcasting the universal and national meanings of Zionism.
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An obvious winner a year later was the author A. B. Yehoshua, who up to 2000 was active in Israel’s liberal left, together with Amos Oz and David Grossman. Minister Livnat declared that his work was a proof that ‘Zionism can inspire qualitative and excellent works of literature’. She also added: ‘All these works express, from different artistic angles, the Zionist narrative that unites the people in Israel. We are talking of very important works of art that enrich the Israeli culture’. The chair of the prize committee was the fiddler on the Zionist roof, Chaim Topol, who oversaw a budget of 53 million NIS for encouraging Zionist culture in Israel.
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To their credit, some artists expressed discomfort with governmental encouragement for Zionist art and culture. As they wrote to the minister of culture when the prize was issued in 2011, ‘This is a prize that encourages recruited art for the sake of political goals. We demand its abolition and would like to channel its funding to the depleted budget that is supposed to support free art in Israel.’
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The ministry rejected the protest, and its funding for 2013–14 increased.
Winning the prize was also the most effective way of absolving oneself from past allegations of post-Zionism. This is what happened to the pop band Habiluim. Named after one of the first Zionist settlers’ movements of the late nineteenth century, they were regarded as part of the ‘radical left’ in the 1990s. Not bothering to hide their desire to win the prize (unless this is a very sophisticated and subversive form of protest), they adapted their lyrics to its requirements by writing about the wish of the left in the past to make territorial concessions:
Maybe we should give the Arabs everything;
Maybe this is Zionism to leave a rotten place
and rebuild everything from the beginning
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Perhaps it is still a post-Zionist song nonetheless, thus explaining why they did not win the prize in 2013.
While official ministries were now openly encouraging Zionism as cultural production, it was left to less clearly identified bodies to spot the residues of post-Zionism in the local culture, academia and media. An organisation called NGO Monitor (their motto: Making NGOs Accountable) posts a highly detailed list – the NGO Index – of hundreds of groups that in some way address in a post-Zionist matters connected with Israel, in some cases including the precise amount of funds they have received from abroad. Ten groups are selected for special attention, but the index includes all the human and civil rights NGOs in Israel as well as the local branches of Amnesty International. These bodies have indeed been active, and I trust that history will judge them favourably for having kept alive a pacifist, humanist and socialist alternative to the way the idea of Israel has been implemented in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But for the time being, these critical NGOs number just a handful, and indeed, as some of the more acute observers of the scene have noted, the battle for the idea of Israel has moved abroad.
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Brand Israel: The International Version
In 2007 a poster of an almost naked Miss Israel, Gal Gadot, and a poster of four fit young men, equally barely dressed, were the faces of Israel in a campaign named Brand Israel, commissioned by the government and the Jewish Agency for Israel. The young woman (Miss Israel 2004 and a star in the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster
Fast and Furious
) was meant to attract the heterosexual young American to a rebranded Jewish State, while the young men became the faces advertising Tel Aviv as the gay capital of Israel. One wonders how Theodor Herzl or even David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin would have regarded this presentation of Zionism as a soft-porn wet dream. But policymakers had decided that anything and everything was appropriate in the struggle to fend off Israel’s negative image. The local team explained that such posters ‘allowed us to gear our message to the younger generation, especially males, and towards a demographic that did not see Israel as relevant or identify particularly with
Israel’.
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But in fact the campaign targeted people in all walks of life with images and texts tailored to the inclinations and preferences of every group. If the idea of Israel became a prize at home, abroad it became a product.
The campaign began in the summer of 2005, when the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Israeli Ministry of Finance concluded three years of consultation with American marketing executives and launched Brand Israel: a campaign to recast and rebrand the country’s image so as to appear relevant and modern instead of militaristic and religious. Huge sums of money (the sums would be revealed some years later) were allocated for marketing the idea of Israel abroad in order to combat what the political and academic élite in Israel regarded as a global campaign to delegitimatise the Jewish state. It was to be a gigantic effort, and the team appointed to see it through was accordingly called BIG (the Brand Israel Group).
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The first unit of the regime thrust into this campaign was the foreign ministry and its diplomatic service. But it needed an academic team, especially in the areas of political science, international relations and history. Using lessons developed in the study of anti-Semitism, they provided a narrative of the origins of this new challenge to the idea of Israel, a challenge that called for boycott, divestment, and sanctions. The initial attempt to define the origins was more descriptive than analytical, but it did succeed in locating the moment of birth: the UN’s World Conference on Racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa, in early September 2001. According to the initial academic narrative, this meeting, with its obvious interest in Palestine, marked the launch of the delegitimisation campaign against Israel. The fact that it culminated on 8 September, three days before 9/11, did not escape the Brand Israel team, and thus the two events were directly linked as being two sides of the same assault against the free world.
This connection between 9/11 and the so-called delegitimisation campaign was made very openly by Benjamin Netanyahu on various occasions. In a speech given in the Knesset on 23 June 2011, for instance, he referred to an unholy alliance between radical Islam
and the radical left in the West against the free democratic world, of which Israel was the ultimate symbol. He lumped together in addition to the UN meeting in Durban and 9/11, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruling against Israel’s apartheid wall in 2004 – and then, he added to that history for good measure, the famous case of the MV
Mavi Marmara
, an attempt by an international humanitarian-aid flotilla to reach besieged Gaza in the spring of 2010.
The main task of Brand Israel was to depict the country as a heaven on earth, a dream come true. Israel would now be identified with beauty, fun and technological achievement. This was the new version of the idea of Israel, and the messengers were newly created front organisations. One of them was the David Project in North America, which became very active in articulating the campaign among college students. One of its many actions was to try to counter the view of Israel as one of the most hated states in the world, together with such countries as Iran and North Korea, and stress that it was among the top twenty-five states whose citizens were glad to be part of it.
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The project’s purpose was to convince everyone that Israel was one of the happiest places on earth because of its high-tech achievements.
The Brand Israel team felt that Israel’s history was another asset that would help sell the country in the twenty-first century:
In terms of heritage benchmarks, Israel is home to fundamental religious and historical landmarks, including the Western Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Baha’i Temple in Haifa. Israelis boast a high quality of life, and the country’s democratic values focus on inclusion and political representation of all its citizens, including women and religious and racial minorities.
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The David Project came up with its own explanation for the discrepancy between what the country had to offer and its negative global image:
We know misperceptions of Israel are rampant in the media; ordinary citizens across the globe see Israel cast as yet another violent nation in a region steeped in unrest and war. Conversations taking place in print, on television, and in the blogosphere often regard the Arab–Israeli conflict as both all-consuming and myopic; the diversity and excitement of Israeli society is often subsumed by twenty-second sound bites focusing on only one aspect of the Israeli story.
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And it pinpointed the mission for the Brand Israel team:
How do we change perceptions? How do we introduce nuance into global conversations surrounding Israel? How do we discuss the highlights and achievements of Israeli society, while also recognising its weaknesses and shortcomings? What needs to happen to remove Israel from the bright spotlight of a violent conflict?
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The answer to these challenges appeared on the official website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rather than winning the argument with facts, information or moral viewpoints, the ministry proposed, it would be far more useful to brand Israel and market it like a product. Gideon Meir of Israel’s foreign ministry told
Haaretz
in 2007 that he would ‘rather have a Style section item on Israel than a front-page story’.
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What this meant in practice was that any PR campaign for Israel should avoid any association with the conflict or the Palestinian issue. This was the spirit of the guidelines given to yet another front organisation founded to help disseminate the new take on the young country. In 2001 a group in California, ISRAEL21C, began its work to ‘redefin[e] the conversation about Israel’ and ‘show how Israeli efforts have contributed incalculably to the advancement of healthcare, the environment, technology, culture, and global democratic values worldwide’. As in the famous episode of the British sitcom
Fawlty Towers
, when the hotel owner is trying not to mention the Second World War to his German guests, so too this NGO was instructed not to mention the war or the Palestinians. The other side
of the equation was elegantly articulated on America’s East Coast by a PR expert on the team, who advised his colleagues to give up the attempt to win the argument against the Palestinians, because, as his words were paraphrased in
Jewish Week
, ‘proving that Israel is right and the Palestinians are wrong may be emotionally satisfying for advocates, but not necessarily effective in changing people’s way of thinking about Israel’.
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This expert, the executive vice president of ISRAEL21C, also remarked that discussing Israel in terms of its conflict with the Palestinians was probably the wrong way to go about it: ‘You have a narrow bandwidth, where Israel can only win some of the argument. We are trying to broaden the bandwidth to include Israel’s accomplishments.’
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