The Palestinians don't need PR - they have brilliant event marketing!
By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency
Jerusalem --- If you asked me this question a year ago or ten years ago, my knee jerk response would be money. The Palestinians and the Arab world have oil dollars, millions of them to make us look bad while slamming our towns and cities with rockets and missiles.
But the real answer is actually two fold.
Yes money is one part. But we also have access to money.
The Palestinians (when I say the Palestinians it means the Arab world) are more creative than the Jews.
What?
The Jews who dominate Hollywood and the media are being decimanted by Arab creativity.
Our PR sucks because the Israeli government does not retain professional PR or social media professionals. Just look at last week's Israel to the UN Mission press conference.
Very few attended.
It did not make major media. Less than 100 people viewed it on YouTube!
But when the Palestinians do something - they are truly great.
Just look at their creativity - flotilla ships to Gaza, powerful photoshopped pictures on Facebook, staged videos of "dead Palestinians" on YouTube, the chutzpa to walk into stores in Paris, by the hundreds, to demand boycotts and now - knowing no limit - the production of an elaborate opera openly illustrating their terrorism and anti-Semitism.
An opera about such a horrific incident. The 1985 murder of a disabled Jewish American who was vacationing with his wife aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship when Palestinian hijackers shot him in his wheelchair and threw him off the deck.
“The Death of Klinghoffer” was scheduled to run at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
And where are the Jews?
Where are the Israelis?
The Israelis are today putting out fires in southern Israel. Fires in our towns and cities caused by Hamas terror rockets. The Israelis are holding up signs saying: "free our boys". The Israelis are hitting Syrian military sites for attacking our northern border with missiles.
Israel is at war and just doesn't have the time for being media creative.
Take one step back. We were at war in the 1960's yet that generation really knew how to respond. Transcending Abba Eban, Hollywood produced such greats as Exodus and Cast A Giant Shadow.
In the seventies we produced not one version but three of Entebbe.
We were not issuing news releases to a tired, biased media which does not care and to a public which has no time to read beyond the headlines.
Israel went where the people were. Where the public would spend hours focused on various issues. Israel went to the movies and to the stage.
People love to be entertained and will actually turn off Facebook and Twitter for a good movie.
Today, the Palestinians are grabbing the stage.
Don't we have any talented screenwriters?
Can they not find funding from Sheldon Adelson and others?
Going to Haiti and Japan on humanitarian rescue missions to save hundreds is noble.
But a movie and a play are eternal.
Dim the house lights and win public opinion.
