One of the major goals of the “rebranding” project is to increase tourism to Israel. To this end, several of the participants in Livni’s conference claimed that the fact that Israel is perceived as a religious country is a marketing liability. Israel’s religious reputation drives away potential tourists who are attracted less by the divine than by the libertine, they said.
This is an odd argument for people who make their living in marketing. The first rule in marketing is to start with your core market and Israel’s core market is religious – particularly Christian – tourists.
Last month Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog told The Jerusalem Post that while Jews remain the largest single group of tourists to Israel, with 40 percent of the market, evangelical Christians today are closing in fast. Today every third tourist in Israel is an evangelical Christian.
Israel only began making a serious effort to attract Christian tourists in 2001 when then tourism minister Benny Elon made outreach to American evangelicals his primary goal at the ministry. Given that there are some 60 million evangelical Christians in the U.S., it should be clear to marketing executives that Israel has barely begun to scratch the surface of their tourism potential. Moreover, Herzog noted that the millions of Christians in Latin America and Europe are yet another still-to-be tapped, massive tourism market.
So if the marketing executives weren’t paying attention to Israel’s core market potential when they shape their rebranding concepts, who are they paying attention to? David Saranga from the New York Consulate-General said that one of the primary target audiences that the Foreign Ministry is trying to attract is the homosexual community. Ministry officials view gay culture as the entryway to the liberal culture because, as he put it, gay culture is the culture that creates “a buzz.”
That is, the main target of the Foreign Ministry’s multi-million dollar PR campaign is the liberal Left in the West. This makes sense not because these people are Israel’s most likely supporters. To the contrary, Israel’s natural supporters are the ones the liberal Left pokes fun at. Indeed, the so-called liberal Left are the ones who call Israel “that sh–y little country” at fancy dinner parties.
The reason it makes sense that advertising executives and Foreign Ministry officials wish to spend millions of taxpayer dollars reinventing Israel to receive support from the liberal Left is because, overwhelmingly, these Israeli executives and officials run in liberal Left social circles. They wish to reinvent Israel because they want to be popular on the cocktail party circuit.
The desire to win support from the Left is reasonable enough. The problem is that these Israeli officials fail to understand the nature of their problem with their liberal friends. Leftist support of the Palestinians does not stem from ignorance regarding Israel’s liberal views of feminists or homosexuals. Gay activists and feminists from New York to Paris to London to Stockholm do not participate in pro-Palestinian protests because they are under the misimpression that Israel is illiberal or homophobic or misogynistic.
They participate in anti-Israel protests because they think that Israel is wrong. And they oppose Israel because they don’t realize that their own freedom is closely linked to Israel’s ability to win the jihad being waged against it. The fact that they believe as they do is at least partially the fault of the same Israeli officials who now wish to stop discussing why Israel fights, and instead discuss how Israel parties.
For the past 13 years, Israel’s public relations has centered on our support for the so-called peace process with the PLO. Foreign Ministry officials believed that by making Israel’s peace platform the central pillar of its international PR drive, they would inspire people to support us.
But this is not what people understood. People understood that Israel was encouraging them to support the PLO. And so they did. And when PLO officials told them that Israel is a racist state, they believed them.
By arguing that they should talk about how peaceful and fun Israel is, Israel’s diplomats seek to rid themselves of the difficult job of defending Israel’s right to exist and its right to defend itself from its enemies that seek its destruction. Rather than promote radical feminism in Israel, it is their thankless job to attack and expose those who deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and statehood as bigoted and wrong.