Markets

Israel is About to Waste a Bunch of Money on a Doomed PR Campaign

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: October 20, 2011 / 11:11 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

With a vote on statehood for the Palestinians looming in the United Nations, Israel has engaged a swathe of public relations firms to burnish its image in Europe. It will be a pointless effort. It doesn't matter what you think of the conflict in the Middle East, or whether you agree that Israel is portrayed unfairly in the media. This about a key foreign policy mistake that countries make repeatedly: The idea that if only your advertising was a little bit more effective you can change the world's mind about you.

The idea is so pervasive that even PR people who admit Israel's PR is lousy -- like Ronn Torossian of 5WPR -- remain convinced that it's lousy because there isn't enough of it. Qatar and Hezbollah have PR agencies (so do the Palestinians), he says, why shouldn't Israel?

The U.S. has tried this repeatedly. In 2010, President Obama spent $50 million on PR in Pakistan to counter extremist views in that country. Do the Pakistanis love us now? No. The Punjab government recently turned down $127 million in U.S. healthcare aid because it was angry about the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Using PR to persuade foreigners that they're wrong simply never works. Take Torossian's argument that Israel is unfairly criticized because it is tiny (the size of New Jersey with a population of 7.5 million) compared to its giant, hostile neighbors (300-plus million people in an 386,000-square-mile area). The attention paid to the dispute over the West Bank and East Jerusalem is disproportionately large given the small amount of land at stake, he says. This is true, as a matter of geography. But even Torossian can't make that argument without mentioning that the land was taken in a war. That's the problem with foreign policy PR -- it often has the unintended side effect of reminding "them" why they hate "us."

A country's image abroad is largely a function of its foreign policies and cannot be shaped by advertising. It's a shame that governments remain addicted to the idea that the opposite is true.

Related:

Image by Wikimedia, CC.