14/5/93

The Word From Zion

How can they abolish hasbara? You canג€™t have a Jewish State without explaining what it is.

    It was going to take a lot of explaining, Zadok thought to himself. His faithful staff was gathered round the old sandwichboard table, Gewirtz at the far corner picking absentmindedly at splinters as he'd done at every meeting for nearly 35 years. The table was a lot bigger back then, Zadok mused.
    He stole a glance at Vashti, the glitter girl of the department in its heyday, when men were men and women were men's and life was simple and eggs were still being rationed. Oh, she was an eyeful, he remembered quiveringly, when the department discovered her in a trench at the border near Misgav Am, holding off marauding infiltrators singlehandedly since the day she got a rifle for her bat mitzva. She was a natural for his department. It was for the national good that they stole her away: the Syrians were said to covet the Galilee just to get a closer look at her.
    And old Bindl. A gentle tear welled up in Zadok's good eye. Ay, Bindl, Bindl. It was his idea to drain the swamps. It would look good to the goyim, Bindl had argued, and if you want to make a go of this hasbara department of yours, you want to give the world something other than Jaffa oranges. The memory brought a tight little smile to Zadok's old puss. It was at this very table. Sharing a cool cup of Eshel, they debated late into the night. Ach, Zadok had said, don't drain, develop. Put up a hotel, and a boardwalk, maybe a casino. Get rid of the mosquitoes and bring in Sinatra, Sammy, Satchmo. Never mind the goyim: it'll look good to the Jews. Build it, and they'll come to live here by the millions, Zadok promised, just as long as they have a Jewish Vacationland in the new Jewish State.
    But Bindl's vision won out, and Zadok's department had created, for all Mankind to see, the New Jew, the Sabra. And the Old Man himself called him in and said Zadok, this is good, this patriotic propaganda program of yours. For as long as this nation has something to say for itself, you, and your people, shall say it.
    This is going to be hard to explain, Zadok thought sadly, as he stood up, cleared his throat, and announced to his faithful staff that, according to the decree of Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the hasbara department had just been abolished.
    Onklous gasped. Gewirtz burst into tears and furiously picked at his fingernails. Shmil leapt out of his chair. "They can't do that!" he shrieked hysterically. "They still need us! It's like you once said, Zadok: 'You can't have a Jewish State without explaining what it is.' Golda called us 'the Israel Defense Force Abroad.' Abba Eban would have been tongue-tied if not for us. Herzog telling the world why we had to fight, and Bibi telling the world why we couldn't -- our own inspiration! Don't they understand? Without our posters and ads and policy papers and conferences and emissaries and brochures and mailings and rallies and cocktail parties, who's gonna know who the good guys are?"
    Onklous, who had bounced around in Absorption and then Fruit Marketing before finding a home in Hasbara -- he cooked up the brilliant "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden" campaign -- sulked bitterly. "Shmilik," he said to his regular lunch companion, "I think maybe that's the point. The 'good guys' are in Gaza now. And Bosnia. Moscow, even. Nobody hears us anymore. So we made the desert bloom, so what? The big thing now is not what's good for the Jews but what's good for the ozone layer. A cabbage patch in the Arava is not front-page news anymore; a jungle in Brazil is."
    "Hear, hear!" Fink said cynically. "You want to grab attention? You want to make the world love us again? Come up with a PR hit this crazy generation really digs. Ban smoking. Appoint a Palestinian woman Chief-of-Staff. Free Vanunu. Announce that circumcision is a violation of human rights. Hug Arafat. Issue a new stamp portraying a crying Palestinian child refugee tangled up in barbed wire at the front door of the Mosque of Omar. Get in step with the Nineties, call them 'Zionist causes' and see how fast they love us again. Hasbara as we know it is dead, my friends, as dead as the hora."
    Moshe Fink had heard enough. Dramatically, he arose and pointed a quaking finger at Pinhas Pletzel, head of the planning committee. "You. Big talker. Big plans. Big know-it-all. Big Nothing. You should have figured this would happen. You were too busy hobnobbing with the politicians to see that the writing on the wall was that the doodoo was about to hit the fan. In this business, in this day and age, you don't keep your job if you just do your work. You've got to turn heads. Take their breath away with new messages, new mediums. For goodness sake, Pletzel, we're still handing out leaflets while everyone on Earth is at home watching TV, cable, video." Fink took a deep breath, and steadied himself. He had joined Zadok's team in 1974, coming over from Health and Welfare believing that this is how he could better serve the country. God, he loved this country. God, he loved his job.
    "What we need now," Fink said in little more than a whisper, "is a last hurrah. As  I figure, we have a few shekels left in the strongbox. We could either have a smarmy little farewell party with wine and cheese and Bisli, or blow the whole shebang on a final, unforgettable, whizbang hasbara spectacular that'll bring 'em to their knees in Foreign Affairs."
    The new guy, Kinim, perked up. "You mean a full-page ad in the New York Times?"
    Fink just glared at him.   
    "I got it," said Menutak, "a rescue mission! A planeload full of emaciated olim from Sudan, that'll show 'em!"
    Fink pointed out, through clenched teeth, that there aren't enough Jews there to fill an economy-class seat, never mind an entire plane.
    Zadok was growing irritated. "Nu, so mesmerize us. What lofty idea is going to raise those Shimon Peres eyebrows?"
    "A billboard."
    "Just that? A billboard?"
    "It'll be," said Fink, pausing pregnantly, "the greatest national plug since ... since the Moon landing."
    "Yeah, that's what Sharon said on the way to Beirut." Everyone snickered.
    Fink continued. "You read the papers? Or do you depend on this room full of dodos for inspiration?" He unfolded a scrap of newsprint. "Look at this, from The Jerusalem Post, a wonderful little column called Postscripts. It says that a mile-long billboard will be launched alongside a space rocket. The advertisement will be visible for about 30 days from space as it orbits the planet. And it goes on to say that theyג€™re looking for an advertiser. Hevre, that could be us!
    Fink turned to his boss. ג€œIs that lofty enough for you, Zadok? We put our message up there on what's going to be the biggest, most famous, most universally-read slogan since Moses held up the tablets on Sinai. Hell, it could even get us on the cover of Advertising Age!"
    Ben-Shishlik whistled.
    So did Onklous.
    Gewirtz pricked his pinkie on a splinter. "Yeow!" he yelped, "It's brilliant!"
    "It's mad!"
    "It's so ... American!"
    "Can you imagine? Shimon Peres and four billion people are going to look up and read the Great Zionist Message screenprinted across the sky. What's Saddam going to do, order his people under their beds for a month so they shouldn't see it? Just think, people everywhere wil be so busy gazing at it that all wars will cease. Maybe even the intifada. It'll save our department for sure!"
    Mrs. Pushke, a sour old naysayer who had quit the Treasury to work for Zadok, didn't think it was such a good idea. "What if it's cloudy?"
    "So we'll get a discount. C'mon, Pushke, even you can see this is an idea we can't afford to pass up."
    Pushke wrinkled her wrinkled nose at Fink. Standing akimbo, which lent her an impenetrable toughness that got her squeezed out of Interior during their unsuccessful "Be Friendly to the Public" campaign of '76, she posed the question Fink prayed might be overlooked. "So tell me, Moishele, how much cost this little whim of yours? Hundreds? Thousands? Tell me, Moishele, because I already know, I read Postscripts too. Forty million dollars. And I don't think they're going to take it in monthly instalments like at the Co-op. I seriously doubt, Moishele, that they'll even accept money that says 'shekels' on it." She had a wretched way of being right. "So Zadok, Mr. Man-in-Charge, maybe you'll inform me how much we have in the way of Washington dollars?"  
    Mrs. Pushke announced with a sarcastic flourish that she was finished, and took her seat. Bindl passed around the antacid pills and nobody said no.
     Fink adjusted his toupee and stroked his van-Dyke, which he dyed mahogany-brown. "Well, I think we can get it down to maybe 38 million or so, maybe 35 if the company selling the advertising space is, you know, of the faith. Then, we pass the hat to the Jews of America. If every one of them donates $6, we can do it. And I think they will: we just have to promise to put each donor's name on the billboard." 
    "In alphabetical order."
    "Good idea, Aaronson."
    Zadok rose slowly and looked around at his staff, the best brains in the hasbara industry. "And what," he asked, "will the message say?"
    What, indeed, when the whole world is going to read it. The $40 million Zionist message heard 'round the world. The last hurrah of hasbara.
    Well, what would you say?