Israel’s foreign minister is looking for a way to spend $150 million on hasbara
Sa’ar insisted on the major budget increase when he and his United Right Party joined the governing coalition last month and he became foreign minister. At the time, Sa’ar said the budget will go towards “media campaigns abroad, in the foreign press, on social media, and more,” including “concentrated activity on U.S. campuses to change their attitude towards Israel and its policies.”
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Sa’ar and his deputy, Sharren Haskel, have been holding wide-ranging brainstorming sessions with different groups of people with experience in the public diplomacy field to get ideas.
Dozens of “influencers and public opinion leaders,” as the Foreign Ministry described them, attended, ranging from people like former government spokesman Eylon Levy, former IDF English-language spokesman and current Foundation for Defense of Democracies fellow Jonathan Conricus, Institute for National Security Studies fellow Ophir Dayan and StandWithUs Jerusalem Executive Director Michael Dickson to makeup YouTuber-turned-hasbara influencer Ashley Waxman-Bakshi, Israeli model Nataly Dadon and comedian Yohay Sponder.
Saar held another meeting this Thursday with leading figures in civil society organizations that deal with public diplomacy-adjacent matters, including the Jewish Agency, ELNET, AJC, Nefesh B’Nefesh, NGO Monitor, the World Zionist Organization and Honest Reporting. Future meetings are planned for Arabic and Spanish speakers, the tech sectors, campuses and Israeli-led foreign aid organizations.
“We are in the middle of an effort to change the approach towards the whole topic that was once called hasbara, and that I call ‘consciousness warfare,” Sa’ar said. “The democratic world is influenced by public opinion…and when it is not good for us, then it influences the elected political level’s space to maneuver in the international arena.”
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One example the source cited was that after Palestinian Media Watch founder Itamar Marcus spoke, Saar asked why he does not receive the information about how much money a country donates to the Palestinian Authority, which funds salaries for terrorists and their families, before each conversation with his foreign counterparts and diplomats.
“He wants to turn the Foreign Ministry into Palestinian Media Watch,” the source said. “It’s clear he wants to make the Foreign Ministry more right wing.
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Among the suggestions to improve the Foreign Ministry’s work that came up in Thursday’s meeting was that Jewish Agency emissaries receive information that can be relayed to the public as soon as diplomats do. Several organizations leaders suggested that information be relayed faster, such as Honest Reporting, which asked to receive details about journalists killed in IDF actions who were members of terrorist organizations.
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The influencers meeting, as one attendee put it, was “a mixture of very serious people and very nonserious people, like a TikToker who said he does hasbara in Spanish after learning the language by watching Telenovelas.”
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Jonathan Elkhoury, an advocate for Israel who is a gay Christian Arab refugee from Lebanon living in Israel since 2001, told JI that he “focused on minority voices…My life mission is to give a platform to Israeli minorities through delegations…My belief is that we need to be on the ground, speaking with students on campuses, and speaking with people in their communities. We need to show that we are humans and not these monsters that they say we are, to share our personal stories and not just one-minute videos full of buzzwords.”
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Another attendee recounted that “one of these Israelis who had nothing to do with hasbara before…started doing press tours with hostages and their families. She gets up and says Thanks to my work, Switzerland defunded [UN agency for Palestinian refugees] UNRWA. People have been working on the UNRWA issue for years. Does [UN Watch Executive Director] Hillel Neuer not exist?”
Dadon, the model, called for greater censorship in the Israeli press, saying that Israeli media gives haters of Israel fodder to use against them. Sa’ar responded that Israel can’t even control what soldiers put on social media, let alone the press, according to multiple attendees.
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He continues his public advocacy work, with a podcast partly-sponsored by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. He also visits Jewish diaspora communities around the world with organizations such as the Jewish National Fund and StandWithUs.
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