If only life were as simple as a cup of coffee.
While I have never been a coffee drinker, I respect Israelis who are dependent on caffeine to get anything done nowadays, after a night of sirens, missile attacks, and runs with children down steps to shelters.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to appeal to those Israelis when he released a video of himself visiting a café in the Jerusalem Hills and getting a cup of coffee. While officially intended to prove to the world that he had not been assassinated, the real audience was voters back home, whose support he needs in the upcoming election.
Netanyahu wanted to show Israelis that he is engaging in hasbara (public diplomacy) during the war, when he has actually given just one softball interview to his friend Sean Hannity at Fox News, and his office ended daily English briefings.
The video went viral abroad, not because of Netanyahu but because of the 17-year-old redhead smiling behind the counter. She was credited with “doing more to fight antisemitism in 24 hours than the Anti-Defamation League has in years.”
If only that were true! When buff black belt judoka Yoel Razvozov was tourism minister, he decided to help Israeli hasbara by releasing a video of himself taking off his shirt at tourist sites. If only Israel’s public relations woes could be solved by just highlighting the beauty of our waitresses and the muscles of our ministers.
“Men of the Internet have been transformed into an army of Charlie Browns in pursuit of the cute redheaded girl who served Bibi his coffee,” Jewish Insider senior political correspondent Lahav Harkov wrote on X/Twitter.
The Charlie Brown comparison actually works well because Israel keeps trying to kick the proverbial football, even when it keeps missing due to the manipulations of a cruel world full of Lucys who won’t stop trying to hurt us.
Nevertheless, just as the soldiers on the military battlefield must keep fighting even though they are right to be exhausted after nearly 900 days of warfare, so must the soldiers on the media battlefield.
Explaining Israel and America’s war on Iran really should be relatively simple compared to other conflicts. The Iranians are the bad guys who sponsor terrorism all over the world, have murdered thousands of Americans, and hang gay people from cranes.
We are the good guys, allied with the United States and doing our part to save Western civilization from genocidal terrorists and an Islamic fundamentalist nuclear weapon.
So why haven’t polls indicated a huge rise in support for Israel among Americans of all ages across the political spectrum?
Well, we’ve already lost half of America if the main spokesman for the war is the president of the United States, Donald Trump. A Reuters/Ipsos poll when the war started found that only 7% of Democrats supported it.
We’ve also lost the people who care more about the price of gas in their hometown than the fate of the people of Iran, 10,000 km. (6,000 miles) away from Manhattan. Saturday Night Live’s opening skit last weekend depicted a family deciding at a gas station to give up one of their kids.
But there was finally a poll with positive results for Israel this week, taken by respected veteran pollster Scott W. Rasmussen. It found that 58% of US voters considered Israel an ally of the US, including 70% of Republicans and 47% of Democrats. Just 13% of all voters considered Israel an enemy.
In a nice boost, 41% of American voters saw Israel as a force for good in the world, while 21% saw it as a force for evil, compared to January when 29% said they saw it as a force for good, and 34% declared the Jewish state evil.
“Working with the US has benefited perceptions of Israel,” Rasmussen reported. “This is a natural result of fighting a bad guy. Americans overwhelmingly see Iran as a force for evil.”
Another reason for the positive numbers in the poll could be that the Palestinian issue is slowly being forgotten again. Actor Javier Bardem was the only one to mention the Palestinians at Sunday’s Academy Awards, after the issue dominated in previous years, and that was hours into the broadcast.
Bardem looked like a sore loser while announcing the award for Best International Feature, which was won by an apolitical Norwegian film and not The Voice of Hind Rajab, a movie about a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza.
It cannot be taken for granted that the Tunisian Hind Rajab movie did not emerge victorious. Pro-Palestinian activists in Hollywood ran a strong campaign for the movie.
But they were countered effectively by Ari Ingel, the executive director of the Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and promoting arts as a bridge for peace, aided by the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting.
Ingel sent a critique of the movie, sensitively written by HonestReporting’s Rachel O’Donaghue, to hundreds of Academy members. The movie has no distributor in Israel or the US, so I arranged for O’Donaghue to see it at the home of an Academy member in Tel Aviv, in order to have her article online and ready to be read around the world when the film’s Oscar nomination was announced with great fanfare.
Of course, it’s disappointing that no one at the Oscar ceremony called for Iran to be freed. Bardem could have done it because one of the films nominated in the international feature category was directed by an Iranian who was repeatedly arrested for criticizing his government.
Instead, he called “No to wars, and free Palestine” when wars are being waged to free both Iran and Gaza from the totalitarian Iranian regime and its proxy Hamas. Bringing down that regime, which continually called for America’s destruction, could bring about the long-term security that Israel, the Palestinians, and the entire region deserve.
That is the message Israel and the US must be conveying to the world. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told his ambassadors around the world to cooperate with Israeli diplomats, the same way American and Israeli air force pilots are flying together.
That means ensuring that even the politicians of both countries stay on-message and keep in mind that their words reach across the globe and not just their political base.
Someone at the Foreign Ministry should show Defense Minister (and former foreign minister) Israel Katz the lead headline in Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post: “Katz vows southern Lebanon will be turned into wasteland like Gaza.”
That may be a great headline for someone running for a top spot in the upcoming Likud primary, but it is a regrettable statement for the No. 2 man in the Israeli government to be saying when the world is watching.
It’s not too late for this war to be used effectively to make Americans across the political spectrum realize that Israel is an asset for the United States and not a liability.
That is exactly the wake-up call Americans need with their coffee.
The writer is the former chief political correspondent and analyst for The Jerusalem Post and the first speaker to have lectured about Israel in all 50 US states.