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June 11, 2004/Sivan 22 5764, Vol. 56, No. 38
Pro-Israel leaders spring up
As intifada rages, advocacy efforts are hatched in living room meetings
CARL SCHRAG
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
National organizations, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), teach leadership skills for individuals to bring back to their own communities. Here, a Phoenix delegation visits with Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), front center, during the AIPAC 2004 Policy Conference held May 16-18 in Washington, D.C. Pictured, back row from left, are Ken Schnitzer, Jonathan Tratt, Stuart Fern, AIPAC Arizona Director Evan Bernstein, David Finkelstein, Rabbi Ariel Shoshan, Michelle Hicks and Cary Frumes.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Hicks
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For months, Los Angeles Jewish activist Roz Rothstein had been watching the events in Israel with increasing horror.
But it was the hair-raising accounts of the bludgeoning murder of two Israeli teenagers in a cave near Tekoa in May 2001 that compelled Rothstein to act.
She invited 40 people from a variety of organizations and backgrounds to a meeting in her living room.
"There was nothing being done," Rothstein said. "I wasn't getting any mail. I wasn't even being solicited to buy Israel Bonds, and I'm on every list. We wanted to see what we could do together."
Stand With Us was born that night, and Rothstein today is its executive director.
The group, which trains pro-Israel advocates and runs a variety of educational activities in Jewish institutions and on college campuses, is one of a new breed of pro-Israel advocacy startups that have been launched in large part because their founders believed they were filling a void.
Major Jewish organizations long have engaged in pro-Israel advocacy in schools, interfaith groups, campuses, the media and among elected officials.
Some of the newcomers felt the Jewish establishment was slow to respond to Israel's crisis after the Palestinian intifada began in September 2000. Others simply were unaware of existing advocacy efforts and drew up plans to advance Israel's cause in the United States.
Around the time the Rothsteins established Stand With Us, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi had given birth to her first child and was trying to run her million-dollar political consultancy from home. After years traveling around the globe, Laszlo Mizrahi found herself watching television for hours while her son slept.
What she saw on the news upset her, and she decided she would write a check to a Jewish organization that addressed media coverage of the Middle East conflict.
But Laszlo Mizrahi couldn't find an effort that seemed sophisticated enough - so she decided to tackle the job herself.
She closed her consultancy and established The Israel Project, a Washington-based effort to help pro-Israel spokesmen hone their message.
Laszlo Mizrahi, whose clients included the Clinton-Gore team, collaborated with other political consultants, including Frank Luntz, whose clients come from the Republican side of the political spectrum. The two united around their desire to get Israel's message out to the American public.
Laszlo Mizrahi has conducted polling about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is presented to American audiences and has trained pro-Israel spokesmen.
"We run The Israel Project the same way I would run a political campaign," said Laszlo Mizrahi, 40.
But the stakes are very different. "Whether we win or lose with the images affects whether Jews will be able to live securely in Israel, America and Europe," she said.
Last month, The Israel Project launched a Press Ambassadors program that will train Israel advocates across America to serve as liaisons to local journalists and editors whose input shapes coverage of the conflict.
The choice of Shoshana Cardin - a former chairwoman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations - to head up the Press Ambassadors program represented an important step toward merging The Israel Project's work with establishment efforts for Israel.
Martin Raffel, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs' associate executive director, welcomed the emergence of "boutique operations" in Israel advocacy.
"Not everyone is suited for working through the establishment," he said.
Some of the startups discover they need the infrastructure and activists of local federations and community relations councils, and end up collaborating with the established organizations.
Gail Hyman, the United Jewish Communities' senior vice president of communications, noted that many startups have developed creative approaches to spreading pro-Israel messages.
"The federation system needs to pay attention because good ideas come from many sources," she said, pointing to Israel shopping fairs and The Israel Project as two examples.
Those ideas have come from more groups than any single newspaper story can describe. They range from individual undertakings and informal, grass-roots efforts based in synagogues or living rooms to well-funded operations focusing on one aspect of the broad picture of image making.
For many Jews, the word "advocacy" immediately brings to mind biased media coverage of the conflict.
Indeed, media coverage and the situation on college campuses have sparked the greatest interest among many American Jews.
Some of the boutique efforts, like Israel at Heart, have a singular mission. Founded by New York businessman Joey Low, it brings three-person teams of young Israelis to college campuses and Jewish communities across the United States. The Israelis tell their own stories and help audiences see other sides of Israel than the conflict they see on TV.
At a meeting at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, two young Israeli men and one woman, all college students and Israeli army veterans, spoke about their daily lives to a group of 15 law students.
"I don't need people to become activists," Atalia Birman, 23, said after the session. "I don't need them to comment on every article they read. My goal is to open their minds. That's why I'm here."
Judging by the response from the audience, Israel at Heart's informal framework works.
"Everybody should try to hear their story," second-year law student Daniel Bakondi said.
The Boston-based David Project offers training sessions that teach people to "promote a fair and honest understanding of the Middle East conflict." Tactics include putting the Israeli-Palestinian standoff in context by comparing it to other international conflicts and by assessing the parties' behavior and standards.
At a training session in Los Angeles for Stand With Us activists, Charles Jacobs, founder of the David Project, sought to reframe discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"It's not about occupation and refugees," he told the crowd in a Los Angeles conference room. "The conflict is about Jewish existence in the Middle East."
While Jacobs concedes that it helps to know the details of the Arab-Israeli conflict, part of the David Project's approach to spokesmanship is the art of spin. Jacobs offered tactics for turning a challenge or a question into an opportunity to present a preplanned message or make a statement.
While this tactic works well on television - witness the success of some Palestinian spokesmen - the most effective advocates still are armed with facts, figures and a solid grasp of history.
Many of the startups have focused on media coverage of the intifada, but the notion that there's a problem with media coverage of the Middle East isn't new: The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has been operating since 1982. But it has grown significantly since the intifada began.
It has been joined on the media front by Honest Reporting, which encourages people to hold newspapers and television networks accountable for their coverage.
In communities across the country, scores of informal media monitoring groups have cropped up to keep tabs on local news organizations. Local Jewish community relations councils, as well as the national Jewish defense organizations, offer guidance.
Last year, UJC and JCPA offered six regional advocacy training workshops, and JCPA provides consulting services to communities as they implement local advocacy efforts. Raffel and others said the goal of enhancing American perceptions of Israel is better served by a broad effort to educate, not a narrow focus on battling media bias.
UJC and JCPA also are developing a strategic plan to turn their crisis-based advocacy efforts into a longer-term operation to support Israel advocates across the country.
The huge array of startups begs the question: Does Israel need so many approaches to building positive public opinion?
While everyone interviewed for this article acknowledged that some of the startups have made a contribution, Lisa Eisen, program director for the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, predicted that when the dust settles, the established organizations still will be doing most of the work.
"These flavor-of-the-week efforts make a splash and then dissipate," Eisen said. "I don't know about the sustainability of some of the newer organizations."
Some of the new activists say nothing would make them happier than to be able to close shop and return to their former lives.
"If Israel was at peace and the crisis subsided, I would look forward to reopening my business and going back to my life," Laszlo Mizrahi said. "Unfortunately, I don't see that happening in the near term or the long term."
Funding for this series was provided by the American Jewish Committee's Dorothy and Julius Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations and The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies Inc.
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