How to Win the PR War in Israel

Keeping the residents of this house in Sderot inside, rather than a shelter,

would have scored a major PR victory in favor of Israel.

I was reading today several articles critical of Israel’s response to Hamas’s aggression in Gaza. All the arguments revolved around the same criticisms: Disproportionate response, humanitarian tragedy and unjustified attack upon Palestinian civilians. So I kept asking myself the question of how does Israel overcome these criticisms in the future, and regain the moral superiority it deserves.

To stop the debate of proportionality, Israel must stop placing its civilians and children in shelters.

The alarms that give residents in Sderot 15 seconds to seek shelter must be removed. Had Israel done so in the past, the 6500 Qassam rockets launched into Southern Israel would have hit homes and schools with civilians and children in them, and many would have died or been maimed, thus, giving CNN, Reuters and Associated Press plenty of pictures of bloody and grieving Israelis, and made the current response more proportional and palatable.

Upon hearing sirens, Israeli children should be taught to run towards open spaces while adults should hide. This would ensure that adults survive and are available to pick up the injured children and run towards foreign journalists. Hospitals can wait. If a child dies, he can be replaced. All it takes is sexual intercourse. Once foreign journalists have taken pictures of the injured or dead child, Israelis have to learn to pass the body to different adults and instruct them on wailing and tearing their hair as if the child was their own.

Another way of regaining moral superiority can be achieved by instructing Israelis on how to deal on the topic of adult injuries in front of foreigners, UN officials and reporters. After injured and dead children have been photographed and filmed, some adults with disabilities should be dragged from their wheelchairs and placed on the shoulders of some screaming young man who should again run towards the cameras. Adults who have suffered spinal injuries, polio, amputations, muscular dystrophy or any form of paralysis are particularly photogenic and very attractive to the BBC, CNN and the New York Times. The disability does not have to be current or war related.

Another measure that would help Israel would be to physically attack and kidnap foreign journalists. This would result in the foreign media placing its journalists in fancy hotels, while Israeli stringers and free lancers would be hired to do the reports and photography, usually sympathetic toward Israel. Since the freelancers would be Jewish, chances are that a few would offer reports critical of Israel. Having a member of the freelancer’s family kidnapped and tortured until the desired report is achieved can easily solve this.

Israel has to take advantage of its technological know how. Simply by using Adobe PhotoShop, a minor explosion can be converted into something resembling Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A bad wound can be cut and pasted into dozens of otherwise healthy people. Google Images is full of gory wounds that are in the public domain.

Finally Jews around the world should go out and demonstrate with signs full of spelling errors calling for all Muslims to be killed and sent to the ovens. The media will ignore this type of vitriol. I don’t know why, but I assume this will happen simply because Muslims carrying such signs have never been on the screens or front pages of the mainstream media. Some day I will figure out why, and I will report on it on this blog.

By these simple measures, in the last few years Israel could easily have achieved a breakthrough in the public relations war. It is true that a few thousand Israelis would have died, but what is a few thousand dead Jews for a people used to losing six million?