May/June 2008

The Re-Branding of Israel
From war planes to women: Why at 60 Israel's image is taking off in new directions

by Mandy Katz

Listen to Mandy Katz talk about Israel's Branding Campaign on Beyond the Pale.

In a glass-enclosed Manhattan conference room, Boaz Mourad tilts his chair back and aims a TV remote at the giant flat-screen monitor hanging along an exposed-brick wall. He clicks the play button and a video rolls. Onscreen, a dozen randomly selected Americans—non-Jews of mixed ages and backgrounds—are sitting around a laminate table in a plain conference room while a perky moderator probes their impressions of faraway countries most have never visited. Imagine, she suggests, that each country is a house.

In the social sciences, this kind of indirect questioning is called the projective technique, says Mourad, an amiably bearish six-footer of 43 whose soft diction is rounded ever so slightly by his native Hebrew. The idea, he explains, is to bypass people's rational thoughts to reveal their emotional associations. For the focus group in the video, projections of "Italy-house" call to mind a large table in a sun-dappled garden with a clan gathered round. Friends have joined them, participants tell the moderator. She probes further—how are they passing the time? Talking, joking, playing cards, group members call out. They imagine wine and singing and delicious food. A party is underway and everyone, including the Americans in the conference room, wants to linger.

When discussion shifts to another "dwelling," Israel-house, Mourad hits the pause button. "Watch the body language of the guy on the left," he instructs. Indeed, the atmosphere in the room has changed palpably and nowhere more clearly than with the burly 30-something, who shrinks into himself and rotates his chair away from the table as the talk proceeds.

"What's outside the house?" the moderator is asking. "I see a lot of concrete," someone volunteers, and no lawn or garden. There are gates, she is told—bars, maybe wire. "It's not very attractive." "Are you going in?" she inquires. "No, it's dangerous," come the replies, "We're not invited." There's a man at the door, an Orthodox man standing guard, protecting the womenfolk inside.

He's holding a gun.

When the clip finishes, Mourad stresses how hard it is to reconcile the Israel described on-screen with the Israel he knows and, in fact, epitomizes—a progressive, diverse and technologically advanced nation where daily life resembles that in the United States and Europe. Mourad—who, as the son of an El Al employee, was raised on four continents—earned a doctorate in psychology from Princeton at 25. His firm, Insight Research Group, located in trendy Tribeca, studies consumer behavior and uses the information to help companies and organizations forge and communicate their identities—in adspeak, to "brand" themselves. Its accounts include big-name retail labels (Nike and Gucci are two) and media powerhouses like Sony, the BBC and America Online. Insight has also worked for the United Jewish Communities and, since 2004, as a mostly pro bono adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry. It was for the latter (in collaboration with several other U.S.-based marketing experts and the Israeli Association of Advertising Companies) that he convened focus groups—there were 12 in all—to find out how outsiders view the Jewish state.

What he learned is that, to ordinary Americans, Israel is a dark bunker.

 

Product branding is an ancient idea. Business academics date its genesis to Roman times, when potters imprinted thumb marks on clay vessels they sold. As a corporate investment, however, the practice took off in the United States in the 1950s, when the development of massive consumer production capacity coincided with the advent of a new national television audience.

The notion of branding localities for tourism and investment gained momentum in the 1970s, which you might know if you remember that "Virginia is for Lovers," and accelerated in the 1990s when the United Kingdom famously styled itself "Cool Britannia." As a marketing term, "nation branding" received its first print mention in 1998 in the Journal of Brand Management and by 2003 was showing up as a budget line item from Finland to South Africa.

Today, signs of nation or "place" branding are everywhere, from advertorial sections that fall out of your Sunday newspaper, promoting countries as varied as Kuwait, Korea and Ukraine, to slick embassy events celebrating image-burnishing products like Swiss luxury goods and Australian wines. In 2006, impoverished and strife-ridden Uganda spent $1 million on CNN commercials touting its wild wonders with the tagline, "Uganda: Gifted by Nature." As a measure of its ubiquity, the concept was satirized by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a strip that ran in March. Set in the fictional central Asian autocracy of Berzerkistan, it opened with President-for-Life Trff Bmzklfrpz seated at his desk, perusing the country's glossy new promotional material, as Uncle Duke's son Earl, a self-styled image consultant, remarks, "It's step one of our proposal to re-brand the country."

"Every nation has a brand," Mourad says, "whether you like it or not." So it's not surprising that Israel, too, is in the midst of a branding quest as it marks its 60th birthday. The Brand Israel effort officially announced by the Foreign Ministry in 2006 was actually born five years earlier as the second Intifada raged and dust clouds hovered from the World Trade Center's collapse. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mourad, who, with his family, was forced from his downtown apartment, saw that Israel was losing the world's attention by depending on Jerusalem's traditional approach to its brand—an approach epitomized by the Hebrew word hasbara, which translates as "propaganda" but also "advocacy" or "explaining." When it comes to hearts and minds, he realized, Israel could win every argument and still lose the fight.

Mourad found a receptive audience at the Foreign Ministry, where media officer Ido Aharoni was reaching the same conclusion. "The overall strategy of communicating Israel's image has been to emphasize how we are right and they are wrong," Aharoni says. From the eloquent mid-century speeches of Ambassador Abba Eban to the clipped, South Africa-inflected sound bites of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's current spokesman, Mark Regev, Israel has relied on rhetoric.

"There's a need for that," admits Aharoni, "but if you look at what's going to get [people] more on your side, it's not rational, military justifications. It's more emotional, humane things." His boss, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, agreed; on assuming her post in November 2006, Livni appointed Aharoni to head their country's first brand management office. In branding, Aharoni says, Livni saw "a great opportunity not only to improve Israel's image and bring economic dividends," including increased foreign investment and tourism, "but also to fight dangerous trends that doubt Israel's legitimacy."

Almost doubling her ministry's spending on public diplomacy, Livni secured a special appropriation of $4 million for the first two years of the Brand Israel program, over and above the $3 million annual outlay for traditional forms of hasbara. Aharoni estimates his efforts have also received at least $4 million in private donations and in-kind services since 2001. These are significant sums for Israel but minuscule in international marketing terms; by comparison, U.S. retailer Sears announced plans this year to spend up to $75 million on a rebranding campaign.

On any budget, Israel, for a tiny slip of land, presents a huge branding challenge. "If I said to you, 'What does a street in Mozambique look like?' and you gave me a blank stare, we'd be starting at zero," says Fern Oppenheim, an American marketing consultant working with Mourad. "In Israel's case, we're not starting from zero—we're starting from negative."

 

Only Yankee Stadium was big enough to hold the 1956 "America Salutes Israel Pageant" celebrating Israel's eighth birthday. "It is your sacred duty to attend," intoned one Zionist group's flyer—and attend people did: Tickets started at $1.50 for general admission, and 42,455 were sold. The program kicked off at eight in the morning when an Israeli athlete stepped off an El Al plane at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport and set off running through city streets, with an official police escort, to deliver a "torch of freedom" to New York Mayor Robert Wagner. At the stadium that afternoon, police and fire department marching bands played, the Jewish-owned Harlem Globetrotters cavorted and Israel's Olympic soccer squad squared off against an American all-star team. Eleanor Roosevelt and Miss America ascended the infield dais, as did Miss Israel. Even Marilyn Monroe came to pay homage, arriving in an open car beside Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy.

With them rode the erect and dignified Eban, Israel's ambassador to both Washington and the United Nations. Tall and always formal in dark suit and tie, the 41-year-old former British army officer was wildly admired by American Jews—and reluctantly respected by his diplomatic adversaries—for his forceful oratory on behalf of the Jewish state. Using skills honed in the storied Cambridge Union debating society, Eban's adroit politicking had helped persuade Kennedy as well as another guest, New York Governor Averell Harriman, to call that day for an end to the U.S. arms embargo against Israel.

"We are the oldest republic on earth and the youngest people," Kennedy told the crowd. "The Israelis have the youngest republic and the oldest people." More telling, even, than the speeches was Monroe's presence, which let the world know that Israel, like the actress, was fresh, sexy and admired by America's public figures. (Eban would later record that JFK remarked that day of himself and Monroe, "While both of us have great assets, hers are more visible.")

Israel's public diplomacy was easy back then. Lobbying—for arms, for aid, for diplomatic recognition—occupied her official delegations but there was little need for image polishing. The young nation had reaped the affection of the common man from its very first David-versus-Goliath battle for existence against the assembled Arab nations in 1948. Diaspora Jews especially were enthralled by the notion of Jewish sovereignty, says Robert Rifkind, whose father, Federal District Court Judge Simon Rifkind, was a prominent Zionist who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for work on behalf of Holocaust survivors. Robert Rifkind, now 71 and himself a onetime president of the American Jewish Committee, recalls the euphoria surrounding Israel's establishment. "We'd just come through the war and learned of the death camps, and here were people who seemed healthy and vigorous and they were clearing the swamps and building beautiful cities," he says.

What image-building there was rested on bold, simple icons. Rifkind, 12 years old when statehood was declared, remembers running with his older brother from their East Side apartment down to Rockefeller Center to see the new country's flag flying among those of the other nations. The star of David flew even higher on the tails of airplanes flown by El Al, even though the logo in those early days was temporary: The airline's early "fleet" consisted of borrowed military planes painted over for civilian use and restored to military colors after every flight.

El Al itself was a potent symbol. "It was viewed as the vehicle by which the ingathering of the exiles would take place," says Marvin Goldman, author of El Al: Star in the Sky. The airline's ferrying of 45,000 impoverished Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949 was one of several dramatic airlifts that inspired admiration for the new state among Jews and non-Jews alike.

"When Israeli oranges were shown at a trade fair," Rifkind reminisces, "people would go and touch an orange, and say, 'Ah, a Jewish orange!'" The release in 1960 of the movie Exodus starring Paul Newman marked another high-water moment for Israel's international image. "The movie was fabulous public relations," wrote Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman in their 1994 U.S.-Israel history, Friends In Deed. "The world saw the Newman character, Ari Ben-Canaan, as the embodiment of Israel: a tough fighter, farmer and patriot, but also a sentimental lover."

Young people flocked to Israel to pick fruit on kibbutzes and Israel acquired a reputation as a youth mecca. "Largely because of all the good press Israel was getting worldwide after the Six-Day War, tens of thousands of non-Jews came on long visits from dozens of countries," according to Raviv and Melman. "Sun, sea, sex and often hashish combined to make Israel a magnet for the curious and adventurous. A tiny country...was suddenly the place to be."

But the 1967 war proved a double-edged sword from a public relations standpoint. The Jewish state's unexpected victory inspired new waves of euphoria and respect but, with Israel now on top in the Middle East, Third World nations soon coalesced around the Arab cause. Hubris may have played a part in the country's near defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and that, coupled with Israel's increasing political clout in Washington, led Israel's once romantic bloom to fade. "The honeymoon between Israel and the non-Jewish world has come to an end," warned World Jewish Congress President Nahum Goldmann to a 1975 audience of some 600 representatives of Jewish organizations from 62 countries.

The notorious Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 during Israel's occupation of south Lebanon moved the plight of Palestinian refugees to international front pages. Perhaps most telling, the term "occupied territories" gradually replaced the use of "Judea and Samaria" to refer to disputed lands. By 1987, when the first Intifada began, few were pondering the wonder of Jewish oranges. The slingshot had changed hands, and Israel was the new Goliath.

Where once Israelis had been pictured industriously reclaiming the desert, they were now seen scouring downtown streets for body parts after terror attacks. It didn't take long for the second Intifada, which began in 2000, to crowd out almost all non-martial images of Israel.

Could things get any worse?

 

At www.kuperman.tv, you can watch an unusual commercial. Like many videos set in the Holy Land, it opens on the country's border, but the similarities end there: This border is a white-sand beach. Accompanied by a soundtrack of blaring techno music and whistles, a sultry blonde in a red bikini strolls along the water. A goateed young hunk catches her eye and suggestively pats the spot beside him on his blanket. In a wordless exchange, she smilingly turns him down. When he tries to entice her with a bottled drink, she again shakes her head no. He proffers tanning oil, but she giggles at him over her shoulder as she saunters on—and walks smack into a thick post. When the camera finds her again, she sports a cute little bandage on her forehead as a British-inflected narrator intones, "Indeed, Israel can be a dangerous place."

The cheeky vignette, which appeared on television screens in 22 countries in 2004, successfully makes light of Israel's reputation as a high-risk zone while cueing viewers into its youthful culture and beach scene. Its creators were marketing amateurs; they were competing on an Israeli reality-television series much like American TV's The Apprentice. The Ambassador, which dominated Israel's ratings in 2004 and 2005, pitted 14 articulate, attractive young Israelis against one another in a series of challenges designed to select the best spokesperson for Israel. Some of their tasks, like defending Israel before Eban's Cambridge Union and addressing a Meet the Press-type panel, required traditional advocacy skills. But others, like the TV ad, called for ballsier, streetwise inspirations in keeping with the place-branding ethos. The job of selling Israel tourism packages to Parisians, for instance, moved one contestant to accost strangers on the Champs-Elysées while wearing swim trunks, fins and a dive mask.

Each week, a panel of judges voted one contestant off the show. One of those judges was Nachman Shai, the slender, bespectacled director-general for United Jewish Communities-Israel. As Israel Defense Forces spokesman during Saddam Hussein's showers of Scud missiles in the first Gulf War, Shai acquired a reputation as "the nation's Valium" for his calm and reassuring manner, according to one former Israeli journalist.

Ordinarily, Shai admits, a reality-TV role wouldn't be worth his time, but he decided The Ambassador met an important need in Israeli society. "For two years," he said, "thanks to the show, the country was obsessed with hasbara. It's helped to raise the awareness that Israel has to do more [in this arena] than probably any other country." First prize on The Ambassador entitled the winner (a fresh-faced American-born entertainment reporter in season one and a corkscrew-curled German-born business student the following year) not to a cash prize or plum corporate job, but to spend a year abroad promoting Israel under the auspices of Israel at Heart, a private nonprofit.

One of several new U.S. organizations focused on getting the word out about Israel's "human" side, Israel at Heart sends young Israelis to college campuses in North America and Europe to talk about their country. Such "soft" pitches aren't new in the diaspora. In the 1970s, for instance, the American Jewish Committee prepared two-minute "news" films for local TV stations portraying Israel in a positive light. "We'd show a shot of students working on an excavation on their vacation time in Israel," recalls Bertram Gold, who directed the committee at the time. Hundreds of stations used them, he says.

Usually, though, officials and organizations dedicated to improving Israel's image have followed in the footsteps of Abba Eban, wielding rhetoric and traditional media to present—and defend—the country to the world. "We focused solely on crisis management without maintaining the other aspects of our brand," laments brand management director Aharoni. As Israel's spokespeople focused on justification, "the brand itself kept informing the consumer of the crisis."

The emphasis on winning the Israel-Arab debate makes it hard for Americans to see what the country is really like, Aharoni continues. "In today's world, it is no less important for Israel to be attractive than to be right."

 

Aharoni travels frequently between Israel and New York and he's dressed for an evening flight to Tel Aviv in jeans and a leather jacket, his shirt-tails fashionably untucked, when he descends to the lobby of the gleaming, polyglot UN Plaza Hotel. His former offices are nearby in the Israeli government's tightly guarded building on Second Avenue. A tall, slouching fifth-generation sabra of 45, Aharoni lives just outside Jerusalem but holds a degree from Boston's Emerson College and represented Israel fulltime in various U.S. postings for much of the 1990s and early 2000s.

As he leads the way to a neighboring Starbucks, Aharoni jubilantly describes an encounter in the hotel elevator a few minutes earlier, when he and a couple of British businessmen had exulted over Israel's World Cup-qualifying round soccer upset of Russia early that morning—a win that kept England's team in the competition. This kind of pop culture engagement helps Israel's image, Aharoni explains in a seamless, barely accented patter. Bonding through human interests like sports and film, as in the Oscar nomination for the Israeli movie Beaufort, can be just as important as forging good arguments, he maintains. "What's more effective on campus?" he asks. "Another politician from the Knesset? Or a performance by musical phenomenon Idan Raichel," an Israeli singer whose band members and fusion compositions reflect Israel's ethnic diversity?

In late 2001, after Mourad approached him, the two men pulled together a branding team for Israel that included American executives like Fern Oppenheim, who once marketed the breakfast drink Tang for Kraft, but now runs an Israel-oriented media firm. Also signing on were a partner in public relations giant Burson-Marsteller and a communications veteran of Philip Morris, which, as a tobacco company, knows about branding challenges. Together, they formed Brand Israel Group (B.I.G.), setting as their first goal to learn how the country was being perceived through Mourad's focus groups and others that followed in Europe. Around the same time, the Foreign Ministry began to collect quantitative, poll-based data from Young & Rubicam, which surveys attitudes toward some 25,000 international brands on a quarterly basis.

"The data all proved remarkably consistent," especially in the United States, Aharoni marvels in Starbucks. He animatedly pushes aside his tea to reach for a notebook and pen, talking almost continuously as he sketches a grid with quadrants for attributes like "esteem" and "relevance." "What really amazed us was that Israel's brand image was the same in all 12 focus groups, from New Mexico where people had never met a Jew, to people from New Jersey who lived in Jewish neighborhoods."

Americans see Israel as a male-dominated, pre-industrial society peopled by ultra-religious militants and "a relentless producer of bad news," he elaborates, viewing it "only through the prism of the conflict." Focus group participants consistently portrayed his country as "uninviting" and "not fun." "And 'not fun' is the biggest problem for any brand," Aharoni adds.

As bleak as that feedback might seem, Mourad, Aharoni and the other branders see an upside: No matter how negatively they view life in Israel, the data shows that Americans support the Jewish state and consider it a political ally. As one researcher told Aharoni, "Americans support you but they are not interested in having a beer with you."

"I can work with that, " he says. "If [respondents] had just come back and said, 'This is a militaristic society and these people are oppressors'—if it came back all political—then there's not much you can do with it." Instead, Aharoni heard, "If you will only show me who you are, there's a good chance I'll be attracted to you. Show me you're like me."

 

On a website window linked to YouTube.com, a 30-second clip shows a fair-skinned boy with loose brown locks standing in front of a hedge. He could be any American fifth grader but Hebrew spills from his lips: "My name is Daniel," the subtitles read. "I'm 10 years old. I live in Nirit." The camera follows him as he rides his two-wheeler along a suburban street. His narration continues: "We have trees, flowers and a garden. I like my town and I have fun here."

That's it. That's the whole video.

This is "Isreality"—the reality of daily life in Israel—as presented by Israel21C, a non-profit website started in 2001 by two Israeli-born computer entrepreneurs to broaden American perceptions of Israel. Daniel's autobiographical short is part of "The Face of Israel Today." "It changes 365 days a year," explains Israel21C executive vice president Larry Weinberg. "The day before, it was a guy who makes falafel… Israel is an incredibly diverse population but Americans don't get it—they think Israelis are either rabbis or Rambos."

So Israel21C offers news of Israel's fertile scientific and high-technology sectors, "to show Americans that Israel adds value to their lives," Weinberg explains, while its profiles emphasize Israel's diversity and the like-me message the branders tout. The need to project a "like-me" message, of course, is not unique to Israel. Ask the ironically dubbed "Axis of Evil" comedy troupe—four Americans of Middle Eastern origin who poke fun at stereotypes and fears that emerged after 9/11. "Axis" member Maz Jobrani, an Iranian, recently told The Washington Post that he, too, dreams of a humanized view of Middle Easterners. "I'd love it," he said, "if they could go to some guy in Iran, and he would go, 'Hello, I'm Muhammed, and I'm just baking a cookie.'"

"Like me" has been adopted by American institutions like Hillel, the Jewish campus group, which launched its "Israel Starts With i" campaign in 2005 with promotions called "iFests," to show Israel as a place where there are "cool, hip people." Even The Israel Project, a Washington-based non-profit started in 2002 to provide media-relations hasbara, has occasionally ventured into softer branding territory. To dispel what it called "the media's negative Christmas myth" about Israel, it highlighted Israel's religious diversity last December by commissioning and distributing photos of yuletide scenes in and around Jerusalem, including shots of a Santa Claus mannequin in the Old City's souk.

One of Israel's best known and most controversial "like me" overtures—the June 2007 Maxim photo feature titled "Women of the Israel Defense Forces"—was hatched in the consulate general's office in New York and partly paid for by the American-Israel Friendship League and Israel21C. "They're drop-dead gorgeous and can take apart an Uzi in seconds," crowed the British-based "lads' magazine" to its testosterone-stoked readers. The models, all former Israeli soldiers, including a one-time Miss Israel, posed in the odd military accessory (a cocked hat, an open khaki shirt) and little else. The New York Post, for its part, ran Miss Israel's Maxim photo under the headline, "Piece in the Mideast."

The spread provoked protests from feminists and traditionalists alike in Israel and abroad, but the branding team was delighted when follow-up research among Maxim readers showed that the images of Israeli women had profoundly changed their perceptions of Israel. In the photos, Aharoni explained, "You see an urban landscape—you see the very same concrete that people talked about in the focus groups—but, this time, with a beautiful woman with a bikini." Before the article appeared, readers had thought of Israel as "very religious…the way people think of Saudi Arabia. So it breaks the stereotype."

The next phase of Israel's branding campaign is twofold. A domestic component will help Israelis to discern and reinforce the country's brand among themselves, and an international identity and logo campaign will be launched along the lines of "I ♥ NY." It was that successful campaign, begun in 1971, says Aharoni, that transformed a city better known for muggings, mob hits and the Son of Sam into the shiny "Big Apple" of world renown. Who recalls the image of the "old" New York now?

 

"Yes, there are cowboys in Israel," reads the copy beside a photo of a ruddy-looking macho man astride his horse under a big sky. "The only difference is they say 'Shalom' instead of 'Howdy.'" Its subject, a real-life Golan Heights cowboy and nature photographer, is one of five Israelis (the others are a dancer, a computer-graphics entrepreneur, an archaeologist and a chef) photographed talking about their passions as part of a multimedia advertising campaign. Israel's Tourism Ministry is running the ads through 2008 in U.S. and Canadian magazines, on cable TV and billboards and via the web. Reflecting the brand ethos's influence on the ministry, they consumed roughly two thirds of Israel's $11-million North American advertising budget for 2007—its largest ever—while the remaining third was spent on promotions to traditionally loyal religious markets.

Americans account for more than a quarter of Israel's annual tourist visits, which totaled 2.3 million in 2007. In order to double their number by 2011, the ministry is reaching beyond religious Jews and evangelical Christians, who already make up a large part of the U.S. tourist contingent, to target "sophisticated travelers," Jewish and not, who might otherwise visit Paris, say, or Istanbul.

American Jews, as Israel's traditional tourist base, can no longer be taken for granted, cautions New York-based Tourism Commissioner Arie Sommer. "There are many out there for whom Israel is not on their tourism agenda," he says. "They never think about Israel as a place they can spend their vacations, with their family or by themselves. We have to compete with other destinations. And Zionism is not the answer because, if it's Zionism, then they'll say, 'let me send the check' and they're done with their conscience."

So, acting on surveys of Israel's reputation among potential tourists worldwide, (the government's first such probing in 15 years), the ministry chose to highlight what Sommer cites as Israel's own "unique asset:" Israelis. "We know tourism is a people-to-people experience," he explains. "It's not only the stones." So far, Sommer is pleased with the ads' results, noting that the 542,000 Americans who visited Israel in 2007 represent a record high, and 2008 looks to top it.

 

In the world of place branding, the name Simon Anholt turns up everywhere. Anholt, in his late 40s, has masterminded campaigns for countries like Croatia, Germany, Bhutan and his native Britain. The founding editor of the discipline's four-year-old academic journal, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, he is credited with coining the very term "nation branding." He now spurns it though; as he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "it wrongly implies that you can directly manipulate perceptions" of nations without their having "to earn the reputations they feel they deserve."

Anholt takes a dim view of Israel's nation branding program. In third-quarter 2006, shortly after the second Lebanon War, he added Israel to the countries covered in his quarterly poll of online consumers, the Anholt Nations Brand Index. It came in 36th—dead last. In later polls, after Indonesia and Iran were added and ranked even lower, Israel rose to 38th of 40, but Anholt contends that the country will hover near the bottom so long as the Arab conflict persists, because place brands cannot be separated from politics.

"'Branding' can't do a thing to make people change their minds about a country if the news is telling them that it's a war zone," he says. "Where public opinion is concerned, the one thing you just can't do is change the subject: With Israel, the subject is conflict, and if you talk about anything else, people either aren't interested or don't believe you."

Others, like Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner, have put it even more bluntly. "So long as Israel is seen in the media beating the crap out of Arabs, it will be judged a bully, and nobody likes a bully," he wrote in 2006. "As for 'rebranding'—which means changing the subject from 'the conflict' to all the cool and groovy things about Israel—this is insipid… The world's consumers... are sick and tired of Israel and its enemies."

If Israel's nation branding efforts are doomed, then, until a final peace settlement, why bother?

The branders are ready with answers. Good branding can co-exist with unhappy geopolitics, Aharoni insists: "You can disagree with our policies yet go to watch an Israeli film or invest in an Israeli company traded on NASDAQ." Branding works not by changing the political news, he says, but by diversifying the overall message. "It is a decision to communicate this [broader] reality—one that we believe is attractive, vibrant and relevant—in order to give a wider perspective of what Israel is."

Mourad, looking out the plate-glass walls of his conference room to the bustling office below, agrees with his colleague but admits that their strategy may not work equally well on all continents. Focus groups have shown that positive Israel branding will be an uphill battle in Europe, where "there's a lot more resistance and lack of goodwill and an overall dislike. It will be a challenge to change the image there without changing policy," Mourad says.

"It's not hopeless," he muses, pushing long bangs from his eyes, "but, if you don't like someone, I can't tell you, 'Well, she's wearing a nice dress.' Branding is not magic."

 

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