Hiring paid hasbaratchiks to "spew forth bullshit" online, parading out Ehud Olmert to convince Americans that opposing settlement construction is like opposing rainbows and kittens, launching a smear campaign against Human Rights Watch, one of the most conservative human rights organisations around... would it be an exaggeration to say that the Israeli Foreign Ministry is in a bit of a panic?
According to Avigdor Lieberman - advocate of "transfer", former Kahanist and current Israeli Foreign Minister - Israel's poor international image is its most pressing problem. That he could help matters by not being such a racist bastard doesn't seem to have occurred to him, but he does have a point. Israel consistently ranks among the most unpopular countries in the world, and the Gaza massacre provoked a wave of opposition throughout the Middle East, Europe and even, to a surprising degree, the US.
The international boycott campaign, still in its infancy, has been chalking up some major successes, such as French company Veolia's recent decision to pull out of the Jerusalem Light Rail Project. Even more seriously, the EU has become increasingly blunt in its opposition to settlement expansion, motivated at least in part by public pressure. Ha'aretz reports that the British government explained its partial arms-embargo on Israel as a result of "heavy pressure by both members of Parliament and human rights organizations", including a legal challenge advanced by Public Interest Lawyers and the Palestinian human rights organisation Al Haq. Earlier this year Ha'aretz similarly reported:
"An internal Foreign Ministry document last week stated that following Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, diplomatic bodies in a number of European countries have called for a freeze on the upgrade, citing the pressure of domestic public opinion." [my emph.
Last year I observed a shift in EU policy towards Israel, and it appears that shift has continued. In June the EU postponed a planned upgrade of EU-Israel ties on the grounds that "stopping ... the settlements is essential", while EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana caused a stir by advocating the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. The European Commission went even further, much to the fury of Israeli officials, with a statement warning that Israeli settlements and infrastructure in the West Bank are strangling the Palestinian economy, adding that "[i]t is the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence". The EC later issued a partial retraction, but as Juan Cole points out, what's remarkable is that "any office of the European Commission dared critique the colonization of the West Bank publicly and frankly in the first place".
In the US, meanwhile, mainstream discourse on Israel/Palestine conflict is more open to dissent than ever before, with the liberal-left taking an increasingly critical position towards Israel's occupation. In a leaked hasbara manual published by Newsweek, propaganda outfit 'The Israel Project' warns that Israel has "suffered greatly in the court of public opinion". Among other things, it advises apologists for Israel to get around hostility towards the siege of Gaza by relabelling it "economic diplomacy", and to persuade people that the settlements are legitimate by branding any attempt to dismantle them "ethnic cleansing".
Laughable as this is, you have to feel sorry for them. With the election of Netanyahu, the appointment of Lieberman as Foreign Minister and the increasingly brutal destruction of Gaza, organisations like The Israel Project really have their work cut out for them. And when Netanyahu goes around calling German ministers Nazis and branding senior Obama officials "self-hating Jews", that can hardly make their task any easier.
It is quite clear that on the public relations front, the momentum is swinging decidedly against Israel, and this is beginning to manifest itself in state policy. The diplomatic, legal and human rights consensus is as broad as ever, and the slightly reduced partisanship of the Obama administration has, together with Netanyahu's unpopularity and the overt cruelty of the Gaza massacre, opened up space for this consensus to be expressed in the mainstream. We shouldn't paint an overly rosy picture - public opinion in the US is still some way off where it needs to be, and what policy shifts we have seen remain minor and ineffectual. Nonetheless, there are clear opportunities for organisers to make progress, which is one of the reasons why the planned non-violent march on Gaza is so important.
(h/t to Dave for a few of the links)
Cross-posted at The Heathlander