In Supermarket of Nations, are Next Gen’ers buying Israel?

Imagine you’re walking into a supermarket. Your shopping cart is empty, and the shelves are bursting with products. But this supermarket isn’t like the one around the corner from where you live.

Immediately, you notice the difference: instead of the “Breakfast Cereals” aisle, you see one called “Travel Destinations”. Its shelves are brimming with places to visit abroad, enticing you to pick one for your next vacation. The “Made-in” aisle is where you may find, out of hundreds of other products made around the world, a car, for example. But what you see is much more than the VW, Mini Cooper, or Lexus cars themselves. You see Germany, Great Britain, and Japan’s unique styles and traits welded into the machine. Then there are the “Real-Estate Deals”, “Business Investments”, and “Universities” aisles. In fact, there’s an aisle for everything here.

Welcome to the Supermarket of Nations, where people from all over the world shop every day – especially on its digital format, social media. One of the countries they may come across as they’re walking down the aisles that span as far as the eye can see is Israel. Now, ask yourself, would they pick Israel over any other product?

Though the Jewish homeland truly has so much to offer, especially to the “Next Generation” – food, tech, social activism, modern dance, the list goes on and on – we cannot ignore the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement to recast all perceptions of the country in the mould of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s entitled to use this tactic – even if it’s playing dirty, because its objective is different to ours. And we must respond. We would be foolish not to.

But we shouldn’t let it dictate how we manage Israel’s reputation in its entirety.

Unfortunately, many within our tribe fall into this trap, perhaps not without reason. Even those of us who deeply love Israel agree that it has an image problem. Traditionally, the focus has been on taking on the anti-Israel narrative directly, and countering it with rational, fact-based arguments. However, this is a sure-fire way to give BDS exactly what it wants. If we’re investing most of our resources and energy explaining Israel’s geo-political policies, our ability to showcase the country’s most attractive features – in the other aisles of the Supermarket of Nations, where everybody else is happily filling their carts – is significantly curtailed.

The Hebrew expression for “Israel advocacy” is hasbara. Many people use the term, but non-Hebrew speakers often don’t know that its literal translation is “explanation”, “or the act of explaining”. The assumption is, first you need to agree with us, then you’ll like us. We think it works the other way around. Focusing almost all Israel’s efforts on hasbara sidelines the fact that Israel isn’t a conflict; it’s a country. And countries need to thrive, not just survive.

Think of a non-Jewish teen or twenty-something who has no obvious connection to Israel. For them, Israel is nestled between hundreds of other place products, busy staving off its detractors, and placing little importance on highlighting its strengths and appeal. How will they see it for all that it has to offer? Now think of a young Jewish person, walking about in the Supermarket of Nations. Israel is there, but will they “buy” it? As we celebrate Israel’s 75th year of independence, how shocking is it that the answer is no longer a clear and resounding “Yes!”?

With this fresh perspective, you are hereby appointed chief marketing officer of Israel (not, by contrast, its head of advocacy or crisis management). Your job is to make sure that the product, Israel, is placed strategically in the right aisle in the Supermarket of Nations, in a prime location, and to make every effort to ensure that it stands out for all the right reasons!

When you think like a marketer rather than an advocate, the entire playing field changes, as do the strategies, the tools at your disposal, and your metrics for success. In the past 20 years, this is what almost every other country has recognised, investing tens – even hundreds – of millions of dollars in marketing and branding their offering to targeted audiences, shifting global perceptions in the direction of their choosing.

For the product Israel to remain competitive in the Supermarket of Nations, we need to think a lot more like chief marketing officers and a little less like advocates or crisis managers. There’s room for both schools of thought and action, but it’s high time we give the former a fighting chance to prove itself. The future of Jewish peoplehood depends on it.

• This is an abridged excerpt from a new international book, Ethical Tribing: Connecting the Next Generation to Israel in the Digital Era, co-authored by Joanna Landau and Michael Golden.