‘Finally the world understands – Israel is not the problem’

After 11 and a half years leading Israel’s National Information Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, Yarden Vatikai discusses the delicate balance Israel has to maintain in fighting for its image, when the EU, UN, Arab League, an occasional American President and rabid antisemitism is ready to assault Israel’s right to be treated equally.

By Yoav Limor

 

Israel is often under the gun, at home and abroad, for its public diplomacy failures – for not marketing itself, explaining its actions, thwarting hostile schemes based on incorrect or twisted information, while at the same time not playing up its successes. This was true in the past, when most of the world was against us, and to a large extent it’s still true in the age of social media and the endless flood of information.

Israel has racked up a long list of public diplomacy failures in its 71 years of existence. After one of them – the 2006 Second Lebanon War, which was characterized by chaos not only on the battlefield but also in the battle for public opinion – a decision was made to do something about it and establish the National Information Directorate for public diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. The directorate would decide strategy, coordinate between various players, and act as the national leadership’s professional arm in the effort to sway opinions in Israel and throughout the world.

Yarden Vatikai, head of the National Information Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office – Screenshot: YouTube

The person chosen to head the office was Yarden Vatikay. Vatikay had served in the Prime Minister’s Office under Yitzhak Rabin, as IDF Spokesperson, as media adviser to the defense minister and COGAT, and as spokesman for the Jewish Agency. He took up the position when Ehud Olmert was still prime minister, and he stayed when Benjamin Netanyahu was elected, becoming one of the professional staffers who was closest to the prime minister. He is a classic civil servant – careful, non-critical of managers and colleagues, and very loyal to Israel and its goals. This week, he resigned after 11 and a half years in the role.

“The messages Israel sends out are complicated: on one hand, we project that we’re strong, that it’s worthwhile to do business with us and make aliyah. On the other, we broadcast that we’re under attack, a jungle clearing that needs help. That’s complicated to explain,” Vatikay says.

“The Palestinians’ message is much simpler. They say, ‘We’re wretched, save us,’ and that’s it. Our lives are much more complex, and that makes public diplomacy work difficult,” he says.

In the past, Israel spoke in a single voice. What was being said at home in Hebrew was what was said abroad in English. Today, the reality is different. Often, there is a need to send out conflicting messages. When it comes to military actions, for example, the message in Israel is that the IDF is pummeling the enemy, whereas the message for the rest of the world is that Israel is acting proportionally and with surgical precision. The need to say both of those things, without coming off as unreliable, demands skill and coordination. This combination lies at the core of the headquarters’ work.

“The current age of social media allow us to take action much more easily. But it also demands more professionalism and especially the ability to turn on a dime,” Vatikay explains.

“We often need to do both things at once, in different ways – reach public opinion in some country and the leadership of that same country, and sometimes we have to change what we’re saying while we’re saying it. For example, when a new government was voted into Washington, it was clear that the US under Trump would not be the same as it was under Obama.”

The Goldstone Effect

The first crisis Vatikay encountered was Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008-2009. Having learned the lessons of the Second Lebanon War, the various PR engines were tested, even up until the night before the operation. In real time, everything went smoothly. The operation was seen as a success, and the IDF restored its own faith and the faith of the Israeli public in its ability to operate.

“The Second Lebanon War left scars, and not only with us. All throughout the region there were those who saw what happened there and started to think that Israel, unlike its image, doesn’t always succeed. Cast Lead changed that,” he says.

But after Cast Lead came the Goldstone Report. Israel found itself fighting on a new front – facing harsh international criticism and a sharp rise in efforts to delegitimize it.

On 1 April 2011, Judge Richard Goldstone retracted the Report’s premise that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target Gaza’s citizens. – Unattributed

“That was a crisis. The first decision was to not cooperate with Goldstone, but it was clear that we couldn’t ignore him. It took years to handle. Slowly, we changed minds. Even Goldstone himself eventually retracted most of the claims in his report in an article in The Washington Post.”

That event highlighted the need for Israel to fight against international organizations that are supposedly neutral but actually extremely hostile. The national public diplomacy headquarters brought all the actors – the IDF and Defense Ministry, the Mossad and the Shin Bet security agency, the foreign, justice, and finance ministries – into line as part of its attempt to present such international groups as biased.

“That battle isn’t over. It will go on, but we’ve achieved plenty of victories,” Vatikay says. “Today, what these organizations say isn’t accepted as the gospel. People are suspicious of them, dig into their activity.”

The next major crisis was the Mavi Marmara flotilla, in which Turkish activists aboard a ship sailing to Gaza to break the siege was raided by IDF naval commandos, and the botched mission resulted in the deaths of several of the Palestinian sympathizers on board. Here, too, groundwork had been laid – but for the wrong event.

Mavi Marmara Passengers Attack IDF Soldiers with Metal Rods – Photo: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

“We were prepared for the flotilla a few weeks ahead of time. We held meetings and got tactics ready. We were prepared for a riot, and we got a terrorist incident. We failed: from the prime minister, who was abroad; to the commandos, who hadn’t prepared for a fight; and ourselves – material went out too late and it took us hours to respond properly. That led us to make changes.”

Q: Such as?

“From how we prepare, to new procedures and allocation of resources, to professional questions such as setting up a special department in the IDF Intelligence Corps that is devoted to tracking organizations and activities like these.”

To a large extent, the lessons learned from the Goldstone Report and the Marmara fiasco were implemented in Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. “From the very start we realized that we needed to take action to bolster the legitimacy of the operation, both at home and abroad. We brought the prime minister to southern Israel along with foreign ambassadors, and we showed them a display of Hamas weapons, so they would know what was being used against us and understand that we had no choice.”

Q: That didn’t prevent the ongoing campaign of delegitimization.

“True, but the world was more sympathetic to our needs, and remember – that was an operation in which 2,000 Palestinians were killed. Anyone who expected that international opinion would stand up and salute us is welcome to wake up [to reality], but we managed to do damage control and push back on a number of bad decisions by international institutions.”

Part of that was a result of moving to more sophisticated mechanisms for use in public diplomacy, mostly in the battle against inaccurate information put out by the other side.

“In one instance, the Palestinians claimed that a tank shell killed 40 civilians. The rest of the world started to run headlines damaging to us. We shut it down quickly with information from the Shin Bet that indicated that not only had we fired at a location used to launch mortars [at Israel] – including the names of the Palestinians who had been doing the shooting – no civilians had been killed there at all. That information didn’t bring opinion around to our side, but it balanced things. It stopped that incident from blowing up into a PR catastrophe like the cases of Mohammed a-Dura or Kafr Kana.”

The limits of what is allowed

As head of the public diplomacy office, Vatikay took part in every major development, certainly in the diplomatic-security arena. There were few meetings in which he wasn’t present.

“Netanyahu has a deep understanding of public diplomacy. I’ve worked with four prime minister. Each one was different, and Netanyahu is definitely a statesman – a leader who is well-known and admired in the world, a man with a deep understanding of a variety of subjects that allows him to handle the difficult challenge that is the state of Israel.”

Brazilian President-elect Bolsonaro awarded Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu Brazil’s highest and most important national award for high-ranking guests, which is awarded to prominent and influential people and was previously granted to former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II. – Photo: Avi Ohayon, GPO

Vatikay says that Netanyahu is very meticulous and goes into the details. He understands that his personal involvement is critical to achieving PR goals.

“Nothing happens for no reason. There are preliminary steps, deep thought, meetings about how and what we want to achieve with every move. We talk about what we hope to achieve and the potential harm. No matter the field – diplomacy, security, economics, or anything else – public opinion is critical, and we need to address it. It’s not just a matter of PR so people will like us; it’s a significant part of deterrence, of our power, and sometimes our legitimacy to act. That doesn’t mean everyone will be happy about it, but our goal is for them to let us operate.”

Under that framework, the PR office put together the campaign Israel is waging against Iran. That activity is carried out through a number of tools and methods, both open and secret. The campaign has four goals: to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons; to oppose the JCPOA nuclear deal in its 2015 form; to act against Iran and its satellites when it comes to missiles and terrorism; and to limit Iran’s regional influence.

That activity required Vatikay to coordinate closely with many different officials, including some that are less public, like the Mossad and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. The nuclear archive the Mossad brought back from Tehran was secured in a field operation, but the PR aspects were just as important.

PM Netanyahu exhibits stolen material from Iranian Nuclear Program – Israeli TV22 News screenshot

“For months, we worked as a small, secret team on how we would put it out and market it. It wasn’t easy to decide what we wanted to make public – there were 50,000 documents and 50,000 CDs [in the archive] and we needed to maintain secrecy for fear things would leak and cause damage.” According to Vatikay, the operation was a great success: “It’s a fact that even President Trump cited [the operation] as one of the main reasons why he decided to withdraw from the nuclear deal.”

This work demands close coordination between two worlds that generally don’t coexist well: intelligence and PR.

“In the past, the intelligence agencies saw us as the enemy, or at least a threat. As the years went by, they learned that the information they collect can, and often should, serve the PR effort.”

“The Iran nuclear archive was an example of that, and the Hezbollah missile infrastructure in Lebanon, which the prime minister exposed in a speech to the UN General Assembly, is another. Both these reports were preceded by plenty of arguments between the intelligence people and the PR people about what, if anything, should be made public.”

Q: In the past, the intelligence people usually won.

“It led us to work together. Every time the prime minister takes part in a diplomatic visit in Israel or abroad, there is a computer presentation that includes an overview of the area that we prepare with the intelligence folks. The idea is to send these messages in a clear, simple way, without putting sources in danger. When you show a foreign leader a presentation like that, and he understands it, that’s a diplomatic coup that affects our image in the world.”

Q: Nevertheless, there are areas in which Israel is less successful. The fight against BDS, for example.

“That’s a main focus of the entire system. Personally, I think it [BDS] is a real threat with potential for major damage, mostly in terms of economics and image. We need to fight it with all our might, but in a smart way, because there’s a thin line between legitimate criticism of Israel in the world, even if we aren’t crazy about it, and what is out of bounds. Our challenge is how to explain to the liberal world that we see ourselves as part of it, that what is happening here is not black and white.”

Part of that is understanding that every incident could potentially harm Israel’s image, and so every incident must be handled, preferably ahead of time. Years ago, Vatikay woke up to a news report that said the Defense Ministry had completed a lengthy project that was designed to institutionalize separate transport for Jews and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. The international media exploded. Israel was embarrassed. “The idea was reasonable, to prevent terrorist attacks, but the execution was a failure, especially because there was no forethought about the PR damage it would cause. We took it to the prime minister, who cancelled the plan.”

On the other hand, the home demolitions in Tzur Baher in east Jerusalem last week went quietly. “We were careful to present them as a civil matter, not a defense one. The spokespeople were selected accordingly, mostly from the Foreign Ministry, and a few officials from COGAT,” Vatikay explains. “In general, we’ve learned that unlike Israel – the world does not like military people. For big events, you need to use few spokespeople, different languages, and preferably women, as well.”

Image is everything

The demolitions were the last event Vatikay handled. He stayed in the office until late that night, and the next day, left for the private sector, without fanfare.

Q: This job must have had plenty of frustrations.

“When the country is in a complicated but justified situation, and there are large audiences you can’t reach, and worse – when you see the actions being taken against us.”

The solution, he says, is to invest a lot more in public diplomacy: not only in terms of budget, but also the best personnel, and make them part of the decision-making process.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at summit meeting with leaders of 7 East African states – Photo: Israel’s GPO/Kobi Gideon

“We must be aware of what is happening in the world and take action to be influential players. There are entire systems operating against us that have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and anyone who wants to oppose that influence needs to act. Image isn’t just when someone is talking – if the Foreign Ministry invests in an agricultural project in Africa, or if the Homefront Command sends a delegation to a disaster area somewhere in the world, it improves our image. The problem is that costs money, but it’s an excellent investment: we get much more back than we put in.”

“In recent years, we’ve managed to create a better image for Israel in the world. Take the Palestinian issue: until a few years ago, it was clear that they were the good guys and we were the bad guys, the recalcitrant ones who didn’t want peace. Today, the picture is balanced. It’s not that we’re seen as peaceful, but it’s clear to everyone that there are two sides to the coin. The Trump administration has played a big part in that, but so has our work here. The result is not only the number of countries who have diplomatic ties with us or who cooperated with us without formal diplomatic ties, but mainly that the world realized that the situation is complicated, and that not only is Israel not the problem, it’s often part of the solution.”

 

View original Israel Hayom publication at:
https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/08/04/the-world-understands-israel-isnt-the-problem/

 

 

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