Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

The first book to focus on the widespread and well-worn Zionist strategies of propaganda-making that have enabled their success.

Zionism was the brainchild of Central and Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth century who were suffering pervasive antisemitic persecution. For them, the answer to this predicament would be the establishment of a Jewish national entity in the mold of other Western powers. Yet not all Jews shared this urgency. To bring them all on board, Zionists sought to convince a wide swath of disparate Jews that they were in fact "one people" who could only thrive if they achieved their "natural" condition of nationhood.

Some had to be persuaded to fund the enterprise, some to immigrate to Palestine, and some to reject assimilation as an unsustainable chimera.

Diplomatic support from world colonial powers had to be courted. The U.N. had to be persuaded that holocaust survivors had no other place to go. The Zionists had to assure themselves that Palestine was an empty wasteland in need of their redemption. Once the state was founded, its leaders had to preserve global support by insisting that whatever acts they committed were necessary to "defend" themselves from a "second holocaust"--albeit now at the hands of Arabs rather than Nazis.

The focus of this book is on how lies have been made to resemble truth. How has Zionism managed to convince so many in the Western world of the righteousness of its program--even as it has achieved its goals through ethnic cleansing, unrelenting occupation, state-mandated Jewish supremacy, violent repression, international law violations, and brutal wars with massive civilian death tolls?

It examines Israel's public relations tools and methods--from wielding "soft power" and "nation branding" to "greenwashing" and from the spin machinery of think tanks to exploiting the powers of new media, including Israel's public diplomacy apparatus known as hasbara, encompassing a huge network including government ministries, NGOs, campus organizations, and charities.