Behind the Headlines a Zionist Mission in Search of a Functioning Apparatus

The Zionist movement in this country is caught between the Scylla of Arab propaganda and the Charybdis of its own inertia and complacency. At a time when effective Zionist information, qualitatively and quantitatively, is an imperative necessity the educational and informational Zionist apparatus in this country and in Israel is barely in first gear. Zionist leaders and activists concede that the apparatus requires an immediate tune-up, if not total overhaul, to place it on an emergency basis.

The consensus is that after all the talk from Zionist officials about the need to engage in high powered ideological activity is neatly formulated, packaged and submitted to the various Zionist departments for approval and as press releases to the media, the vast majority of Jews still lack the requisite information to counter anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda.

There is mounting frustration and anger in the lower echelons of the Zionist establishment and especially among grass roots Jews in small communities over what is described as business-as-usual in the face of a grave emergency. A number of leaders and spokesmen, as well as activists interviewed by this writer in the past two weeks, asserted both on the record and not for attribution that the Zionist leadership is filled with the best of intentions. “But, you know which road is paved with the best of intentions,” one Zionist activist said laconically.

A disgruntled Zionist youth who tries to organize Jewish students on campus, stated bluntly: “Routine is the order of the day. While pro-Arab propagandists are pummeling us and swaying a lot of people, our Zionist ‘machers’ act on the assumption that things will automatically correct themselves in our favor. Some mornings, when there is a pro-Arab ad in the local newspaper they begin to sweat a little, squeeze out a counter-ad, gloat when it appears, and go back to routine.”

BUREAUCRACY, WASTE, COMPETITION

A Zionist official who has frequently travelled around the country lecturing on Zionism and Israel said glumly that he was getting somewhat discouraged by attending Zionist leadership seminars “where great ideas are produced and refined” but which never seem to get out of the room in which they are discussed. “The worst thing about all this,” he said, “is that very little information is getting to the grass roots Jews in small communities where it’s really needed because they’re isolated and feel the weight of pro-Arab propaganda much more acutely than Jews in cosmopolitan centers.”

On the record and also not for attribution, each of the more than dozen Zionists interviewed were asked how they account for this state of affairs. Each one gave almost the same answer, give or take a variation on the basic theme:

The Zionist informational and educational apparatus in this country and Israel is encumbered by a hydra-headed bureaucracy, competition is rife between various Zionist groups and spokesmen for publicity and leverage, a welter of over lapping activities leading to duplicated and wasteful motions, the inability to plan long-range programs, the assumption that some other organization is doing the job, in-fighting between the various organizations when they get together in umbrella groups, and a tendency to deprecate the day-to-day work of those in the “field” while over-exaggerating the performances by functionaries at the “center.”

Much of this criticism was levelled on the record by two persons who are intimately involved in the “center.” One was David Friedlander, an Israeli who is the shaliach of the Department of Organization and Information of the World Zionist Organization to the American Zionist Federation. The other was Dr. Mordecai Chertoff, the director of public information of the WZO-American Section.

Friedlander, who came to Palestine in 1934 at the age of four, and is currently on leave as spokesman for Technion in Haifa, came to New York a year ago to help the AZF in its public relations and information drive. Dr. Chertoff is a former foreign news editor of the Palestine Post (now the Jerusalem Post), was a United Nations correspondent and news analyst for the now-defunct Israeli newspaper Hador, and was a member of Haganah.

PROBLEM OF ARTIFICIAL DISSEMINATION

“In the early days, before Statehood, we also had propaganda battles with the Arabs,” Dr. Chertoff recalled. “But there is a cultural lag between then and now, an illusion that once a battle was won it was finished. We felt we had answered all the objections to our satisfaction. We don’t realize that there is a whole new generation grown up asking the same questions and we assume they should know the answers, but they don’t.”

Friedlander focussed on a sore point: the competitiveness between the various Zionist groups and leaderships. “We’re not only fighting the Arabs. We’re also fighting ourselves.” He noted that there is a “beautiful community of Jews in this country. They are warm towards Israel. But when it comes to an organizational problem they’re still wonderful Jews but every one has an ax to grind. What the WZO puts out is not good enough for the AZF, and what the AZF puts out is not good enough for Hadassah.”

Every group, Dr. Chertoff and Friedlander noted, has its own special interests, functions, milieu, and ideology. “The information each puts out focusses on its own activities,” Friedlander said, “Zionist information of a general nature is secondary. One million Jews out of six million Jews get material from every organization because all are on the same mailing list, while five million Jews don’t get anything.”

Along the same lines, Dr. Chertoff observed: “We are simply drowning in organizations. There is no general agreement in handling the broad problems. We can’t get any unanimity, any unity in action. The big problem is not the nature of information but who will get the play, whose picture will be sent to the press, who will control what gets into a statement. In short, a unified response to Arab propaganda is virtually impossible because there is a basic lack of rapport between Zionist organizations.”

NOT GETTING TO MIDDLE AMERICA

But if the problem is the inability to get Zionist information down to the grass roots Jewish communities, there is even a larger problem in getting a consistent and sustained informational and educational message across to the non-Jewish middle American population which is sympathetic to Israel but buffeted by Arab propaganda as it relates to such emotional issues as, “We have a right to return to our homes,” “We were forcibly expelled from our land,” and, “If Jews from Russia,

“When you talk about middle America you talk about a section of the population that we haven’t even touched,” Friedlander said. “We are not even scratching the surface. We have communications and media groups, interreligious groups, artists and writers groups who relate to middle America on this level, but there is nothing systematic.”

One of the advantages of the Arab propaganda groups in this country, Friedlander and Dr. Chertoff noted, is that there are relatively few, and those few work in a concerted and cooperative fashion. They have a unified strategy and keep working away at it. In addition, they also have a great deal of money for advertisements. “We can’t answer their ads on a one-to-one basis,” Friedlander said, “or we’ll go broke. The Arabs are flooding the market with slogans half-truths and whole lies. How do you fight this on a one-to-one shot?”

NEED CONVERTS, NOT JUST FRIENDS

Some unified efforts are being made or are on the drawing boards to have the AZF and WZO-American Section work more closely together rather than in parallel fashion as they have until now. Part of the problem is that the two groups are structured differently and have different constituencies and operational methods. In addition, the WZO-American Section must register with the State Department all the literature it distributes.

But both the AZF and the WZO-American Section are finding the vehicles to broaden their respective activities whether in terms of publications, aliya organizing, reprinting Zionist classics, conducting leadership seminars, holding scholars-in-residence programs, having public meetings and organizing more chapters.

“What we need and what we lack is long-range planning, people sitting down and examining what the problem will be next year,” Friedlander said. “We should have material and distribute it so that Jews know what the answer is even before the Arabs post the question. There is no team of bright young Americans or Israelis or a combination of both trying to anticipate the problem and tackling it. We have the material to answer the Arabs but we don’t utilize it properly, don’t distribute it sufficiently, don’t attack vigorously and don’t refer to basics. The Arabs seek converts. We are happy to win friends. That’s not enough.”