GOVERNMENT GAP

Efraim Cohen rightly highlights Israel’s failure to recognize the positive impact of public diplomacy on Israel’s struggle to broadcast truth and legitimacy to a cynical, often anti-Israel, world (“Fire with fire,” Letters, August 5).

A short-lived Strategic Affairs Ministry was closed by the Lapid government just as it was making impact. It was removed back into the Foreign Ministry, where it lingered and died.

It is a constant disappointment for pro-Israel activists abroad to find Israeli embassies totally devoid of staff trained, or even interested, in practicing effective public diplomacy. Most are ineffective in helping local or visiting pro-Israel advocates.

It is left to affirmative but under-resourced and under-funded NGOs to go it alone in their particular public diplomacy niche. StandWithUs trains young pro-Israel students to go into battle on anti-Israel campuses. David Bedein’s Center for Near East Studies single-handedly finances research, documentation and the exposure into UNRWA schools educating Arab kids to a world without Israel and a hatred of Jews that is being sponsored by UN bodies and European governments. Bedein tries to deliver the evidence to overseas parliaments with little help from Israeli embassies or from the Foreign Ministry.

Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, together with our security experts, are attempting to make an important movie showing Israel as seen from Palestine based on 1967 lines. The views are truly frightening. Yet, as IISS-founder, Dr. Martin Sherman, admits, IISS is “flying on fumes” and getting zero help from a disinterested Foreign Ministry.

Cohen is perfectly correct when he wrote that Israel has truth on its side but needs to “disseminate that truth rapidly and accurately, otherwise our enemies stand to win an uncontested victory of narratives.”

We are way behind in the battle for hearts and minds because our politicians fail to understand the essential need to get our message across effectively. No government has given professional public diplomacy the vital importance that it deserves; there is no organized coordination, and little funding for individual NGO efforts. Simply put, it is left to dedicated individuals to try and make a difference.

It is no coincidence that the most effective public diplomacy NGOs have been created by Israelis from English-speaking countries.

They/we are more aware of the needs of our overseas supporters and the vacuum they/ we feel caused by a disinterested Israeli government.

BARRY SHAW

Jerusalem