Some more interesting features on Israel’s relief (and public relations) efforts in Haiti…

The Jewish Forward:

(On) the ground was a retinue of Israelis dedicated to making sure people heard about their country’s humanitarian mission and spreading the word. Press officers from the Israeli military were flown in, as were photographers and a video team to document the work of Israeli medical and rescue personnel. They distributed daily footage to the press. Representatives of Israeli and foreign media were embedded with the group, and other reporters were invited.

A day after the Israeli field hospital opened, two Israeli officers in uniforms canvassed the row of TV producers sitting in their broadcast positions along the city airport’s runway. “We’re telling them about our hospital,” one said.

A feature from The Media Line by Brian Joffe-Walt:

Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli public opinion researcher and political strategist … (said) “Israelis hate when they are seen only in light of the conflict, especially when they are seen as aggressors, and they feel that most of the world is against them, with the possible exception of America.”

“As a result, Israelis are extremely supportive of anything that shows them in a better light because it’s so rare that they get any good news about how they are viewed in the rest of the world,” Scheindlin said. “We see this whenever there is global attention towards Israel for anything other than the conflict. This happened recently, for example, when an Israeli won the windsurfing gold medal or when an Israeli astronaut died.”

“That said, do I think the government participated in this aid effort for publicity? Absolutely not,” she said. “I don’t think it was a cynical move. Israel would have participated anyway. But Israelis do try to use these things to try to leverage a better image for themselves around the world.”

A very trenchant article by Ha’aretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer:

The fundamental reason that Israel is routinely treated much more harshly than its adversaries, despite the fact that they very often carry out far worse atrocities, is that Israel puts itself out to be so much better than them. If in almost 62 years of existence, Israel had succeeded in evolving into a tinpot dictatorship, like most of its neighbors and many of the countries that achieved independence during that period, no-one would be holding it to such high standards, sometimes perhaps, unfairly. Israel is not condemned regularly in the media just because it keeps millions of Palestinians under occupation and embarks on a another mini war every other year, but because it is a country aspiring to be a western democracy while doing so.

Various pro-Israel advocacy groups publish glossy pamphlets detailing the manifold benefits Israeli technology has brought the entire world. Every word there is true and in the next editions, there will be an extensive chapter on the IDF’s international humanitarian missions, complete with photographs of the field hospital in Port-au-Prince. But that won’t improve Israel’s international image one iota. Quite the opposite.

We are a disproportionate country, and the difficulty is to reconcile a tiny brave democracy capable of such acts of greatness with an occupying regime constantly at war with its neighbors will continue to bring us bad headlines. Once the delegation comes back from Haiti.