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Occupation magazine - Related Issues
The Foreign Ministry presents: talkbackers in the service of the State
By: Dora Kishinevski
5 July 2009
Translated for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
After they became an inseparable part of the service provided by
public-relations companies and advertising agencies, paid Internet
talkbackers are being mobilized in the service in the service of the State.
The Foreign Ministry is in the process of setting up a team of students and
demobilized soldiers who will work around the clock writing pro-Israeli
responses on Internet websites all over the world, and on services like
Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The Foreign Ministry’s department for the
explanation of Israeli policy* is running the project, and it will be an
integral part of it. The project is described in the government budget for
2009 as the “Internet fighting team” – a name that was given to it in order
to distinguish it from the existing policy-explanation team, among other
reasons, so that it can receive a separate budget. Even though the budget’s
size has not yet been disclosed to the public, sources in the Foreign
Ministry have told Calcalist that in will be about NIS 600 thousand in its
first year, and it will be increased in the future. From the primary budget,
about NIS 200 thousand will be invested in round-the-clock activity at the
micro-blogging website Twitter, which was recently featured in the headlines
for the services it provided to demonstrators during the recent disturbances
in Iran.
“To all intents and purposes the Internet is a theatre in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre,
otherwise we will lose,” Elan Shturman, deputy director of the
policy-explanation department in the Foreign Ministry, and who is directly
responsible for setting up the project, says in an interview with Calcalist.
“Our policy-explanation achievements on the Internet today are impressive in
comparison to the resources that have been invested so far, but the other
side is also investing resources on the Internet. There is an endless array
of pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets, rich with information and
video clips that everyone can download and post on their websites. They are
flooding the Internet with content from the Hamas news agency. It is a
well-oiled machine. Our objective is to penetrate into the world in which
these discussions are taking place, where reports and videos are published –
the blogs, the social networks, the news websites of all sizes. We will
introduce a pro-Israeli voice into those places. What is now going on in
Iran is the proof of the need for such an operational branch,” adds
Shturman. “It’s not like a group of friends is going to bring down the
government with Twitter messages, but it does help to expand the struggle to
vast dimensions.”
The missions: “monitoring” and “fostering discussions”
The Foreign Ministry intends to recruit youths who speak at least one
foreign language and who are studying communications, political science or
law, or alternatively those whose military background is in units that deal
with information analysis. “It is a youthful language”, explains Shturman.
“Older people do not know how to write blogs, how to act there, what the
accepted norms are. The basic conditions are a high capacity for expression
in English – we also have French- and Swedish-speakers – and familiarity
with the online milieu. We are looking for people who are already writing
blogs and circulating in Facebook”.
Members of the new unit will work at the Ministry (“They will punch a card,”
says Shturman) and enjoy the full technical support of Tahila, the
government’s ISP, which is responsible for computer infrastructure and
Internet services for government departments. “Their missions will be
defined along the lines of the government policies that they will be
required to defend on the Internet. It could be the situation in Gaza, the
situation in the north or whatever is decided. We will determine which
international audiences we want to reach through the Internet and the
strategy we will use to reach them, and the workers will implement that on
in the field. Of course they will not distribute official communiquיs; they
will draft the conversations themselves. We will also activate an
Internet-monitoring team – people who will follow blogs, the BBC website,
the Arabic websites.”
According to Shturman the project will begin with a limited budget, but he
has plans to expand the team and its missions: “the new centre will also be
able to support Israel as an economic and commercial entity,” he says.
“Alternative energy, for example, now interests the American public and
Congress much more than the conflict in the Middle East. If through my team
I can post in blogs dealing with alternative energy and push the names of
Israeli companies there, I will strengthen Israel’s image as a developed
state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity,
and along with that I may also manage to help an Israeli company get
millions of dollars worth of contracts. The economic potential here is
great, but for that we will require a large number of people. What is unique
about the Internet is the fragmentation into different communities, every
community deals with what interests it. To each of those communities you
have to introduce material that is relevant to it.”
The inspiration: covert advertising on the Internet
The Foreign Ministry admits that the inspiration comes from none other than
the much-reviled field of compensated commercial talkback: employees of
companies and public-relations firms who post words of praise on the
Internet for those who sent them there – the company that is their employer
or their client. The professional responders normally identify themselves as
chance readers of the article they are responding to or as “satisfied
customers” of the company they are praising.
Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as
“ordinary net-surfers”?
“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the
policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to
tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as
Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write
responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of
messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.” Test-firing in the Gaza War
According to Shturman, although it is only now that the project is receiving
a budget and a special department in the Foreign Ministry, in practice the
Ministry has been using its own responders since the last war in Gaza, when
the Ministry recruited volunteer talkbackers. “During Operation Cast Lead we
appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few
thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers. We gave them
background material and policy-explanation material, and we sent them to
represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the
Internet,” says Shturman. “Our target audience then was the European Left,
which was not friendly towards the policy of the government. For that reason
we began to get involved in discussions on blogs in England, Spain and
Germany, a very hostile environment.”
And how much change have you effected so far?
“It is hard to prove success in this kind of activity, but it is clear that
we succeeded in bypassing the European television networks, which are very
critical of Israel, and we have created direct dialogues with the public.”
What things have you done there exactly?
“For example, we sent someone to write in the website of a left-wing group
in Spain. He wrote ‘it is not exactly as you say.’ Someone at the website
replied to him, and we replied again, we gave arguments, pictures. Dialogue
like that opens people’s eyes.”
Elon Gilad, a worker at the Foreign Ministry who coordinated the activities
of the volunteer talkbackers during the war in Gaza and will coordinate the
activities of the professional talkbackers in the new project, says that
volunteering for talkback in defence of Israel started spontaneously: “Many
times people contacted us and asked how they could help to explain Israeli
policy. They mainly do it at times like the Gaza operation. People just
asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was
distributed all over the Internet. The Ministry of Absorption also started a
project at that time, and they transferred to us hundreds of volunteers who
speak foreign languages and who will help to spread the information. That
project too mainly spreads information on the Internet.” “You can’t win”
While most of the net-surfers were recruited through websites like
giyus.org, which was officially activated by a Jewish lobby, in some cases
is it was the Foreign Ministry that took the initiative to contact the
surfers and asked them to post talkbacks sympathetic to the State and the
government [of Israel] on the Internet and to help recruit volunteers.
That’s how Michal Carmi, an active blogger and associate general manager at
the high-tech placement company Tripletec, was recruited to the online
policy-explanation team.
“During Operation Cast Lead the Foreign Ministry wrote to me and other
bloggers and asked us to make our opinions known on the international stage
as well,” Carmi tells Calcalist. “They sent us pages with ‘taking points’
and a great many video clips. I focussed my energies on Facebook, and here
and there I wrote responses on blogs where words like ‘Holocaust’ and
‘murder’ were used in connection with Israel’s Gaza action. I had some very
hard conversations there. Several times the Foreign Ministry also
recommended that we access specific blogs and get involved in the
discussions that were taking place there.”
And does it work? Does it have any effect?
“I am not sure that that strategy was correct. The Ministry did excellent
work, they sent us a flood of accurate information, but it focussed on
Israeli suffering and the threat of the missiles. But the view of the
Europeans is one-dimensional. Israeli suffering does not seem relevant to
them compared to Palestinian suffering.”
“You can never win in this struggle. All you can do is be there and express
your position,” is how Gilad sums up the effectiveness so far, as well as
his expectations of the operation when it begins to receive a government
budget.
* “department for the explanation of Israeli policy” is a translation of
only two words in the original Hebrew text: “mahleqet ha-hasbara” –
literally, “the department of explanation”. Israeli readers require no
elaboration. Henceforth in this article, “hasbara” will be translated as
“policy-explanation”. It may also be translated as “public diplomacy” or
“propaganda” – trans. gm
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