Enough with the bombs. Let’s talk about the balms.
Larry Weinberg, executive vice president of Israel21c, has fallen upon this novel strategy of subtly promoting a pro-Israel message. Let the others bandy about charges of colonialism or cronyism or portray Israel as a morass of bloodshed, horror and destruction.
He’d rather you know about the Israeli robot that will mow your lawn all by itself.
“When people think of Israel, there are four different Israels they can interact with,” explained Weinberg, a lifetime public relations professional whose latest client is none other than the Jewish state.
“There’s the Israel of conflict where things blow up and burn and people die. I always say 98 percent of what Americans see and read about Israel is about conflict, and no one seems to disagree with me.
“There’s the Israel of history, which is where most of our missions go — Masada, the Kotel, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
“There is the dependent Israel. That is the Israel we see on missions created by the organized Jewish world. We bring over people who have given money and show them what it has done. And the fourth, and I would argue the most relevant, is the 21st-century Israel. Our mission and focus is to publicize that.”
In the Bay Area recently on a fund-raising trip, the Los Angeles-based Weinberg is executive director of Israel 21c. Its Web site, www.israel21c.com, is just the tip of the iceberg. With a small staff of PR and media mavens in both Israel and stateside and a six-digit budget, the organization has successfully placed around 2,500 stories about Israeli technology in mainstream American media outlets like the New York Times and Time Magazine over the past two years.
Rather than let Israel’s critics determine the shape of the verbal battlefield, Weinberg has changed the face of the game by almost solely pitching Israeli tech stories. He thinks of the Jewish state as a brand, no different from Ford or Velveeta, and his mission is to change the public’s mental associations with brand Israel.
Right now, the mental image conjured up by brand Israel is “a place with people with long beards and black hats and Palestinians throwing stones and soldiers keeping them apart,” he says.
Weinberg feels his work is necessary, and he’s got the statistics to prove it. He cites a recent survey by the advertising behemoth Young and Rubicam. The agency surveyed thousands of Americans on their associations with Israel (along with many other nations) and discovered that the people of the United States feel they know a lot about Israel, but don’t like much of what they see.
“Israel’s brand is constrained by the fact that it’s better known than liked. And Israel is not seen as being similar to America,” explained Weinberg.
What’s more, Americans did not feel Israel was an “innovative” nation. It was not a place that was “relevant to their lives.”
The survey’s findings reassured Weinberg — and Israel21c’s co-founders, Silicon Valley moguls Tzvi Alon and Eric Benhamou — that Israel21c is meeting a dire need.
Simply put, Weinberg feels he must convince Americans that Israel is a place that is incredibly innovative and deeply relevant to their lives.
“If a guy in Topeka doesn’t think Israel is relevant to his life and doesn’t respect Israel based on what he sees on the news, imagine if his wife swallows [an Israeli-developed camera in a pill] and the doctor says, ‘You’ve got cancer, but we’ve caught it early and there’s a 95 percent chance we can cure this,'” conjectured Weinberg.
“If at that moment, you say ‘Mr. and Mrs. Topeka, that pill you swallowed was developed in Israel,’ then Israel instantly becomes more relevant to their lives in a major way.”