unicornnews: Israel needs a $100 million PR spend

One of the Israeli Prime Minister’s closest advisors, Ron Dermer, has admitted that the country needs to launch a public relations offensive to better communicate its position and policies. However, one expert has estimated that to truly win hearts and minds abroad, Israel would have to invest over $100 million into PR.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in his first interview since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the position of Israel’s Prime Minister, Dermer was unsurprisingly critical of Western coverage of the Middle East issue, but admitted that successive Israeli governments had failed to effectively communicate their position to the media and public at large, especially in neighbouring Middle Eastern states and in Europe. He indicated that that was an issue Netanyahu’s government was keen to address.

However, the Herald also quote Eytan Gilboa of Bar-Ilan University, Israel’s leading public diplomacy expert, who reckons Israel’s global PR budget would need to increase tenfold to truly have an impact on public opinion.

They quote Gilboa as saying: “We need to be spending $US100 million a year on information campaigns abroad – primarily in Arab countries and then in Europe, where there is a complete lack of knowledge of what Israel is and what Israel does”. And any campaign, Gilboa added, should include the most modern forms of communication, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Posted Monday July 6 2009 by Chris Cooke