As part of evaluating the competitive landscape of the popularity of nations, in a process referred to in marketing circles as “place branding,” Israel, to no one’s great surprise, came up short in brand likeability, ranking last out of 35 nations included in an August 2006 survey conducted by nation branding expert Simon Anholt – even less attractive to respondents than Indonesia, Estonia, and Turkey.
How could this have happened to a country that is the Middle East’s only thriving democracy and enjoys a remarkably robust economy that has spawned some 1,000 startup high-tech companies, for example, second only to the U.S.?
How, in short, would you go about making the world hate Israel?
This is how you would accomplish that objective if you were an enemy of Israel:
Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for being created “illegally” – through the “theft” of Palestinian lands and property – and thus decide, because of its original sin, it has no “right to exist.”
You accuse the government of a “brutal,” illegal “occupation” of Palestinian lands, especially Gaza and the West Bank (but for many, all of Israel), of being a “colonial settler state,” a Zionist “regime” or “project,” a land-hungry nation, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a “Palestinian” people “from time immemorial.”
You describe the very existence of the country as being the “greatest threat to world peace,” the core cause of all Muslim anger toward the West, the root of all the Palestinians’ suffering and economic plight.
You make “Palestinianism” into a virtual cult whose members offer a worldwide reverence for the Palestinian cause and repeat without end that their nationalistic striving is inviolable, a basic human right. Of all the 100 million refugees who were dispersed around the globe and re-assimilated since World War II, you chose only the Palestinians to languish, as if in amber, in barbaric refugee camps where their lives are used as political fodder to denounce the existence of an Israel that supposedly has deprived them of a home.
You have the United Nations set up an agency whose sole function it is to make sure that this one group of refugees in the whole world are coddled, advocated for, and repeat, mantra-like, that a human “right of return” has been sanctified and assured by international law for the Palestinians, giving only this group of refugees a collective, as opposed to an individual, right of return – and not only to those refugees who supposedly lived in and left what is now Israel, but all of their descendents as well.
You use the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to further demonize and delegitimize Israel, making it a pariah in the world community and issuing an edict that equates Zionism with racism. In 2006-07, if you are the Human Rights Council, you pass one hundred percent of your condemnatory resolutions against Israel.
If you are the autocratic, despotic states of the Arab world, you initiate an unceasing propaganda war against Israel and Zionism, in which it is your intention to encourage your citizens not to question why they live under tyranny and despair under their own corrupt, defective governments, but to buy the notion that their circumstances are bleak because of the success and very existence of Israel.
You depict Jews as apes, pigs, and subhuman monsters, and regularly produce Nazi-like propaganda and cartoons in your state-owned media that accuses Jews and Israelis of blood libels, bloodthirstiness, militarism, a desire for world domination, imperialism, and complicity with the U.S. and the West to destroy Islam – all of which makes Jew-hatred inevitable.
You inculcate Palestinian children, nearly from birth, with seething, blind, unrelenting and obsessive hatred of Jews and the “Zionist regime,” so that kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting plastic AK 47s and dedicate their lives to jihad, and older children are recruited to hide explosives on their bodies to transform themselves into shahids – a new generation of kindling for radical Islam’s cult of death.
When Israel launches a military strike against nests of terrorists or in response to ceaseless rocket barrages, you term the response “disproportionate,” another escalation in the “cycle of violence,” a violation of human rights, aggressive, militaristic, with Apache gunships “pounding” terrorist neighborhoods.