Thursday, June 26, 2014

Does Israel Have an Image Problem?

Today we had the honor of attending the Jewish Media Summit in Jerusalem. The first panel session we sat in on was “Israel’s Image Problem”. During this session I found a few speakers very interesting, like Yigal Palmor and Eyal Arad. When asked about what they think about the image problem of Israel Eyal Arad stated “For media bad news is good news, Jews are always news so bad Jews are excellent news”.  This then makes the issues going on in Israel become big news all over the world. Issue here is is that we also don’t want to be out of the news so we Israel also join in on talking about the issues in Israel. At this point though people who have not been to Israel think that it is mostly military zone and not a civilized society.

Another panelist, Yigal Palmor made a very good point. Yigal stated that “There are as many different views on Israel as Jews”. This is the essence of the issue. Everyone has a different view and everyone can believe theirs is correct, this then leads to conflicting stories. He also said that “If it’s worth stating it is overstated”. This again is the bottom line issue. If it’s not worth talking about then it is harder to find articles about but if it is big news that it is shown all over the world. Issue with this is is that bad news is the best type of news. It ends up leading to the bad things going on in Israel are very overstated while the good news which isn’t as interesting gets left behind.

Overall the panelists were very interesting and made very good points that really outlined the real image issues on Israel.
 --Hadas Ben-David

No comments:

Post a Comment