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The Language Game

By any standard it’s a tough time to be sticking up for Israel on the international stage. Hasbarah (public relations) professionals will tell you that defending Israel to the international community has never been an easy task but the challenges of 2011 are more daunting than ever. In Europe many universities have become off-limits for Israeli speakers and in South America Iran’s growing influence has pushed several countries to ramp up their credentials with the ayatollahs by declaring their recognition of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. Closer to home much of the Arab media is committed to portraying Israel in the bloodiest most graphic terms imaginable.

In discussing these challenges Mishpacha gathered together Major Avichai Adraee IDF spokesman to the Arabic Media; Corporal Motti Schnitzer a native of Antwerp who serves as an IDF liaison to the French Flemish Dutch and German media; and ___ Roni Kaplan a native of Uruguay who serves as the army’s point man for Latin America and Africa.

 

Motti Israel’s position today in Europe is tough to say the least. What are some of the challenges of your job?

Motti Schnitzer: I’ve got an MA degree in Media Communications and I worked for several years in sales and marketing. But when I made aliyah a couple of years ago I felt it was my duty to use my skills to contribute something to the country and to the Jewish People. As the IDF liaison to the foreign media in the languages I speak I’m in daily contact with foreign reporters. It’s important for two reasons: First when an army spokesman can speak to foreign reporters in their own languages it shows a level of professionalism on the part of the army. And although I speak English and so do most of the foreign reporters there’s a different level of communication when you’re speaking in a reporter’s native language. You don’t miss the nuances and you get all the cultural references right. It helps prevent any misunderstandings between the army and foreign journalists.

 

Do your efforts help?

Motti: It’s tough out there as you know but I think we do a lot of good. For example I worked with a Scandinavian reporter who contacted me to do a story about Israel. I put together a program for him to see the army the way it really is and arranged high-level and low-level meetings and tours for this writer I took him to see the air force the navy and the ground forces and I showed him firsthand the way things really are here. After a week here he told me that what he saw was completely different than what he’d been led to believe and the next week he wrote a major article about Israel with a very different angle than he would have without my help.

 

So you spoke to him in English?

Motti: I did but we’ve also got a person who speaks that person’s native language. Of course all this planning takes a lot of time but at the end of the day when you see a really positive presentation on Scandinavian TV — and they do have a lot of influence in the world — you can see that it was worth the effort.

 

Avichai if Motti represents Israel on a playing field that’s not exactly friendly that hardly compares to your area of work speaking to the Arab world.

Avichai Adraee: I served in military intelligence for three and a half years. It was an intense time where I slept ate dreamed and relaxed in Arabic. But obviously I’m not at liberty to tell many stories from that period of time. I was twenty-three when I applied for the job — one day my predecessor Eitan Arusy told me he was leaving the army — and let’s just say it was a trial by fire: The day I finished my officers training course Gilad Shalit was kidnapped. At ten in the morning my mobile phone rang with a panicked commander telling me what had happened and that I’d better get to the office in Tel Aviv ASAP. Two weeks later it happened again with Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser z”l as the Second Lebanon War broke out. Then there was Operation Cast Lead and the flotilla — let’s just say there’s never a dull moment.

If I appear on Al Jazeera I’ve got an audience of 60 million people. Of course 75 percent of those viewers don’t exactly love the sight of me there but the main thing is to stay on the message. You’ve got a ten-minute interview so you’ve got to decide how to use that time to present Israel in the best light possible and to figure how many messages you can get across. You’ve got to use all the techniques you can …

 

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