Experts skeptical Israel’s PR surge will improve its image

Israeli lawmakers last month approved a $730 million budget for public diplomacy – more than four times the previous $150 million allocation aimed at improving the country’s international image. The dramatic increase comes as Israel faces unprecedented global hostility and declining support in the United States.

According to an April poll by the Pew Research Center, 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, while just 37% hold a positive view. Once a bipartisan consensus issue in Washington, support for Israel has become increasingly polarized, with growing skepticism within the Democratic Party. Among Republicans under 50, 57% also report negative views.

Support is falling most sharply among younger and religiously unaffiliated Americans. Even within the American Jewish community – historically one of Israel’s strongest bases of support – backing has dropped to below two-thirds. A February survey by Gallup found that, for the first time, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar last December assessed that Israel needs to dramatically step up its public diplomacy efforts in the global war for hearts and minds.

“We had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,” Sa’ar stated.

“It should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what’s arrayed against us and what’s invested against us, it’s far from enough. This is an existential issue,” Sa'ar warned.

The Jewish state has increasingly tried to reach out to younger influencers on social media. However, some communications experts doubt that the dramatically increased PR budget will improve the country’s global image.

“My position is that history shows all the money in the world won’t help if the policy is wrong,” argued Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and a co-founder of the study of public diplomacy. He compared Israel’s current situation with the United States during the unpopular Vietnam War.

“The US discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.”

Cull describes Israel’s current PR effort as “reputational security.”

“It means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,” Cull explained. He predicted that a boosted PR budget would not be sufficient to improve the Jewish state’s global image.

“I suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground,” Cull said.

Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland of Arab Israeli origin, has surveyed Arab and American views towards Israel for many years. He believes that U.S. public opinion towards Israel has undergone a paradigm shift.

“There has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,” Telhami assessed.

“I have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we’ve seen,” he continued.

Telhami revealed that his polling indicates that a majority of young Americans now believe that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and views the United States as complicit through its support for Israel.

Many Israelis and Diaspora Jews have argued for years that Israel has not been able to present its side of the story to the world. However, Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, disputes this view, drawing on extensive studies of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s online PR efforts.

“The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,” Manor stated. He assessed that Israel is facing an eroding legitimacy challenge. “The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore. And that’s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.”

Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University and an expert on US-Israeli relations, welcomed Israel’s decision to dramatically boost its PR budget.

“This is the worst crisis in Israel’s image abroad,” Gilboa assessed. “In the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel’s right to exist,” he warned. Gilboa predicted that Israel has lost a generation of young Americans, a reality which he called “highly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.”

“Perhaps $730 million is not enough,” he argued. “You have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic."

Meanwhile, Israel is facing an uphill battle against a coordinated Wikipedia disinformation campaign that seeks to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state by replacing historical and contemporary facts with politically motivated false narratives.