Israel Needs Public Diplomacy

Dec. 17 2014

Regularly maligned in the press, condemned by European governments, and faced with the zealous propaganda efforts of its enemies, Israel in recent years has made renewed efforts at explaining its moral position to the world. Some have criticized this public diplomacy (known in Hebrew as hasbara) as self-defeating apologetics. Lynnette Nusbacher, however, argues that Israel has always engaged in bolstering its image abroad, and that such efforts are necessary and can be effective:

The narratives which underpinned Israel’s public diplomacy over its first 60 or so years were important: “Draining malarial swamps,” not “destroying wetland habitats for migratory birds.” . . . The evidence of successful public diplomacy was not only evident in the ability of Israeli government and quasi-governmental institutions to raise capital overseas. It was also evident in a widespread willingness, among decision-making elites in particular, to view Israel in terms of its own narratives, to a point.

Around the turn of the present century, structures which supported Israel’s ability to conduct its particular brand of public diplomacy were beginning to show their age. Support for Israel has become more distinctively elite, more distinctively establishment, and in the United States more distinctively Christian. Some of the old narratives were harder to support, to some extent because Israel’s economic, social, and military success made some of the old stories less resonant; but also because they were old.

Read more at Mida

More about: Anti-Zionism, Hasbara, Israel diplomacy

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023