How Israel can use soft power to improve its global reputation

Israel is an overreported country and a misunderstood one. The media presents it as nothing but a war zone, which is inaccurate and disingenuous. Soft power may be a way for Israel to change this.

The notion that everything I know is wrong quietly haunts me. What if all foreign news coverage is as bad, biased, inaccurate, and full of malignant fallacies as coverage of Israel? I would consider myself informed but know nothing about the world.

I know enough about Israel to smell nonsense from three blocks away. By contrast, I know little about the Balkans and cannot tell you why Serbs are Serbs and their Serb-speaking Montenegrin cousins are not, or are they? And why are they so tall? And so good at sports?

When reading a story about Serbia, my hippocampus soaks it up, and I move on. That is exactly what most people do when they read about Israel. It is why there are so many Israel know-nothings who think they are know-it-alls. What if I am a know-nothing about everything? What if we all are?

Many foreigners experience this when visiting the US. The media has created an image of gunfights, a divided population carry pitchforks, a fentanyl epidemic, and some other unspecified apocalypse waiting around every corner.

Then it turns out that this is just Los Angeles, and the county is full of sane, decent people who live in places where nothing happens and unlikely ever will.

The “America” that popular culture, lousy journalism, and partisan media create in our heads does not exist. It is a construct.

Israel, as it exists in critics’ minds and news bulletins, also does not exist. It is a construct, and one that malicious and nefarious forces have carefully and professionally crafted and put on industrial doses of anabolic steroids. It is a imagined as a land of occupation and apartheid, military checkpoints and security barriers.

People all over the world - including the United Nations’ corrupt and ineffectual leaders, university staff, hanger-on students destined to be begging for research grants in their cardigans forever, and journalistic lunkheads - have formed rabidly anti-Jewish lynch mobs in anger at a version of Israel in their imaginations that is less real than Alice in Wonderland.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs should be pondering this as it has procured itself $150 million to combat antisemitism overseas. I fear this money will be wasted, rather than invested wisely in the Nachum Kaplan Benevolent Fund c/o Belize.