Love of the Land: Talking Point Combat: The Seven Percent

Talking Point Combat: The Seven Percent

Matt
Huffington Post Monitor
11 May '11

http://hpmonitor.blogspot.com/2011/05/talking-point-combat-seven-percent.html

I'd like to address an anti-Zionist talking point that was used a lot recently on multiple threads and talk about how to combat it. Here's a post that exhibits it, we're interested mostly in the first sentence:

Anti-Zionists love to talk about how the Jews "only" owned 7% of the land in Palestine and then talk about how ridiculous it is that they ended up with so much after the dust settled. Any time one of them posts this talking point, just ask them the following: How much of the land did the Arabs own? The answer is about 10% of the land. 80% of Palestinian Arabs did not own any land at all. The rest of the land was government mandated, and therefore up for grabs when the British departed and the war the Palestinian Arabs started began.

So don't let the anti-Zionist revisionist history get away unchallenged. The Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine were approximately equal in terms of legal land ownership, and if the Palestinians didn't want to lose the land they were getting for the first time, they shouldn't have tried to take land from the Jews.

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Love of the Land: Talking Point Combat: The Seven Percent

Love of the Land: Promoting Israel’s Image Means Answering the Libels

Promoting Israel’s Image Means Answering the Libels

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
17 February '10

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner writes today about the effort by Israel’s Information and Diaspora Affairs Ministry to get Israelis to promote a positive image of their country. The idea is to coach those traveling abroad on how to improve their nation’s faltering international image.

The effort gets mixed reviews. Some, like leftist political scientist Shlomo Avineri, think it is representative of a “Bolshevik mentality” that seeks to mobilize the people to serve their government. More to the point, he doesn’t like the information the campaign is peddling because it defends the Jewish state against false charges that Israeli policies are obstacles to peace with the Palestinians.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Promoting Israel’s Image Means Answering the Libels

Love of the Land: Dubai Does PR Right

Dubai Does PR Right

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
17 February '10

It’s always funny to hear people talk about Zionist manipulation of the media, because the truth of the matter is that there’s hardly anything I can think of that the Zionists are more incompetent at. I wish the Zionists were manipulating the media. Israel vs. the media generally has the feel of the Washington Generals vs. the Harlem Globetrotters.

An example of a government doing a skillful job of using the media is on display in the case of the assassinated Hamas agent in Dubai. The Dubai police quickly and efficiently tracked down video footage of the (alleged) hit team, assembled the clips to show the progression of the team through passport control, into the hotel, in the hallway outside the target’s room, and so on. This video was narrated in English, broadcast on the local news, and then uploaded to YouTube for the entire world to see.

I think it’s great news that a senior member of Hamas has been knocked off, and I congratulate whomever did it for their courage and intrepidity. But it’s understandable that the Dubai authorities aren’t pleased that it happened on their soil, and so they’re doing their best to expose the assassins.

Now imagine if the Israeli government had shown the same speed, efficiency, and common sense in getting information out to the world about, say, a headline-making Arab claim that the IDF had committed an atrocity (pick one among dozens: the Al-Dura affair, the Gaza beach explosion, the “Jenin massacre,” or any number of incidents from the Lebanon and Gaza wars).

(Read full post/plus video)

Related article: Mossad? Well, I Certainly Hope So.

Love of the Land: Dubai Does PR Right

Love of the Land: Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
(Originally posted
22 September '09)

(I took a look at this for the first time today, and as things have not changed, it seemed a worthwhile and relevant post)

Every now and then bewildered Israeli politicians and outreach professionals call conferences to wonder why the Hasbara is failing and why Israel can't get its story across. They are given the usual advice of hiring more PR firms, finding innovative ways to get the message through, using the internet in smarter ways and of course that all time favorite, rebranding Israel. Naturally they follow this advice, only to call another conference a year later wondering why nothing has changed.

The answer is simple enough. Defensive PR, like defensive warfare, never works. And Israeli PR and Israeli warfare has been on the defensive for decades now. If you break down Israel's message to a single sentence, it's "We didn't do any of the things we're accused of." That is the kind of message you expect to hear from criminal defendants, and it's a message that impresses no one. The only thing it does is produce a debate about the validity of the accusations themselves, which is to PR what Stalingrad was to the Russian front.

The recent Aftonbladet case represents a classic scenario that demonstrates why Israel's defensive PR is doomed to fail over and over again. The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers were killing Palestinian Arabs in order to harvest their organs. The Israeli government pointed out that the article presented no evidence whatsoever, that no such thing had ever happened and demanded a retraction from the newspaper and condemnation of it by the Swedish government. The only thing Israel accomplished was to popularize the false allegation thus creating a debate over whether or not Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian Arabs to harvest their organs. Pleased by his newfound fame, the author of the article has only escalated his allegations and gone on to do a tour of the Arab world. Leftist propagandists can only watch the fallout and chuckle, because once again Israel has been suckered into playing the mug's game of defensive PR.

Defensive warfare of any kind is reactive. For the last few decades Israel has run itself ragged because it has been reactive. And by reactive I mean that Israel keeps responding to attacks against it, rather than taking the offensive. In the Six Day War, Israel responded to Nasser's planned assault, by preempting him and taking the offensive. The result was Israel's finest hour. In the Yom Kippur War, Israel waited and watched, and was nearly destroyed.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Love of the Land: Some more preachin'

Some more preachin'

Marc Prowisor
Yesha Views
05 February '10

Some more preaching to the Choir…

I attended a “talk” at UCLA, the last of a series regarding Israel. This talk was given by a resident of one of the larger communities in the Shomron, , no stranger to the effort and cause of resettling our homeland, and regarded with esteem in many circles, both in Israel and among the “Choir” outside. The audience was not large, but made varied in religion, religious observance and political views.

My heart was warmed by her talk regarding our world in Yehuda and Shomron, as I know and live in the same world as she does. The talk ended and it was time for questions - the honeymoon was over. Obviously there were the questions from the “choir” which were answered with love and caring, but then came the questions by those whose views had already been hijacked by the “haters” among us. This is where ignorance and arrogance reigned - on both sides.

Many of our “representatives” who speak outside of the country are simply residents, “machers”, activists - they speak with the zeal and love of a land and people that continues to be the flames in our hearts. They represent strength and dedication and they are responsible for having set in motion the wonderful path we are on today in our country.

What many of them do not know is the other side. How do the Arabs think? How does the Left think and why? And the problem which I immediately saw – what do the young non-observant or non-affiliated Jews of the US think?

Simple questions were raised regarding “Palestinian” rights to land, treatment at roadblocks, polarization in Israeli society (raised by an Israeli), and of course the “A” word- apartheid.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Some more preachin'