Battling the Tide of Public Opinion to Build Support for a Jewish State
“All business in a democratic society begins with public permission and exists by public approval.” So said public relations pioneer Arthur Page, AT&T’s first vice president of public relations, in the 1930s (www.awpagesociety.com/about/background-history/the-page-philosophy/).
While Page was referring to the phone company back then, the same sentiment can apply to any company, or any country, for that matter. Not only is it critical to build public awareness for the entity, but it is also critical to build public understanding for its raison d’être.
It is a tough challenge for all start-up countries, but none tougher than that of the State of Israel, whose path to independence was fraught with more controversy than any new nation in history. And in a land well-known for its miracles, gaining statehood was perhaps the biggest miracle of them all.
This is a story about a group of believers who managed, despite all odds, to turn the tide of public sentiment in their favor. They did this through a carefully executed campaign—using both reason and emotional appeal—to show how the founding of the state was not just in the best interest of the Jews, but of the entire world.
Background
But why was public opinion—even among its allies—so against the state’s creation?
The story begins with the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. (Zollmann 2012) Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army captain, was born to Jewish parents in Mulhouse, Alsace, on the French border with Germany. As a result of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 to 1871, the area was ceded to Germany and the Dreyfus family, in order to maintain their French citizenship, moved to Paris (Beitler 2008). In the terms of the day, members of the Dreyfus family were called “assimilated Jews.”
Though assimilated, Captain Dreyfus was nonetheless a Jew in a land growing increasingly anti-Semitic. He was arrested and falsely accused of spying, then selling French military secrets to the Germans. The only evidence against him was a piece of paper found in a wastebasket which said, in French, that he was going “to deliver a valuable French artillery manual to the Germans” (Zollman 2012).
Zollman goes on to note that handwriting experts could not find a “definitive link” between Dreyfus’ handwriting and the note. But, because Dreyfus was a Jewish man from a town now ruled by Germany, the note was more than enough to provoke widespread claims of spying in France’s newspapers. Reporters went wild with the story, to the point of sensationalism, not unlike the “yellow journalism” fervor happening at the same time in America. Story after story questioned Dreyfus’ loyalty. As one editor wrote, “Was he, above all, French? German? Or part of an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’?” (Zollman 2012).
Dreyfus was convicted by a French secret military court and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a penal colony located off the coast of South Africa (“Anti-Semitism” 2015). Zollman notes that this added fuel to the flames of anti-Semitism now sweeping more vigorously across France, military officers stripped him of his rank in a very public, very well publicized disgracing ceremony. French newspapers, such as the right wing La Libre Parole used the conviction “as further evidence of Jewish treachery.” Its publisher, Édouard Drumont, wrote that “every catastrophe that had befallen France had Jews behind it (Brustein 2003, p. 120).”
Drumont’s articles of the 1890s are believed to have been the catalyst behind anti-Semitic movements that started popping up throughout France. According to Brustein (2003, p. 120) a few of the notable ones were La Ligue antisemitque francaise, L’Union nationale, and La Jeunesse antisemite et nationaliste. These movements captured the attention of a growing number of influential reporters throughout Europe. In the midst of the anti-Semitic frenzy public sentiment began to turning increasingly against the Jews in both Germany and France.
Two years after the Dreyfus conviction officials discovered a new traitorous note, appearing to be in the same hand as the one that convicted him. Since he was locked up in a penal colony, it was impossible for Dreyfus to have written it. Handwriting experts this time traced the note to a military officer, Walter Esterhazy. But despite all the evidence against him, Esterhazy was acquitted. After all, the court said, he was not a Jew, he was one of “their own,” and thus was protected by the State.
After this, Dreyfus was granted a retrial. Though the courts found him guilty again, Zollman notes that he was given a reduced sentence, because of “extenuating circumstances.” As news of the new verdict spread across Europe, it ignited a public outcry. Bowing to public pressure, the liberal President of France, Emile Loubet, eventually pardoned Dreyfus in 1899.
The “Dreyfus Affair” now headline news throughout the Continent, struck fear in Jews throughout Europe. Here was Dreyfus, a man who seemed to be a completely “assimilated Jew,” but nonetheless was still regarded by his homeland as an “outsider.” What could this mean for other “assimilated” Jews in Europe?
It was during these fearful days that the idea for forming a Jewish state—known as the Zionist movement—took hold in the mind of French Jew named Theodor Herzl.
The Birth of Zionism
As reported in A Brief History of Israel (Reich 2008), a Viennese daily, Neue Freie Presse sent a young Paris correspondent to cover the Dreyfus scandal. As Theodor Herzl reported on the trial he could feel the anti-Semitic fervor escalating around him. Perhaps the best solution—for Jews and non-Jews—was to found a homeland for the Jewish people. He made his case for Zionism in a pamphlet called, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State 1896). After the booklet’s publication, Herzl traveled by horse and carriage around the continent to publicize his ideas and gain support for the cause from Jews and non-Jews alike. Modern public relations would call that a “road show” or a “media tour.”
Herzl’s message was “we are people, one people. We recognize ourselves as a nation by our faith” (Friedman 2004, p. 47). Reich (2008, p. 16) notes that he viewed anti-Semitism as a “phenomenon that appeared wherever Jews were located.” Herzl believed the Jewish people needed their own nation, and that the nations that vilified Jews would support a Jewish homeland. After all, the Jews would now be out of their hands. Herzl debated between two locations for his vision, Argentina and Palestine, with the preferred location in Palestine.
The Zionist movement officially began in 1897 with the World Zionist Congress, convened by Herzl in Switzerland. It was there that the “Jewish national movement was formed with the goal of establishing a home in Palestine for the Jewish people” (Friedman 2004, p. 47).
The Jewish Migration
The first wave of immigration to Palestine came from Eastern Europe in 1880s, but the desire to leave was not expressed within “leadership and wealthier segments of the Western [European] Jewish communities” (Reich 2008, p. 15). The early years of the 20th century saw the second wave of immigration, beginning in 1904 and lasting until 1914, the start of the Great War. The Jews now residing in Palestine grew from 25,000 to 85,000.
During that same year, as part of war effort, the British invaded [Palestine] in 1917 seizing control from the Ottoman Empire, which had governed the country since 1517. By 1916 the British presented Palestine to the world as the home for the Jewish people.
Making it Official
During World War I, the Zionist movement continued to grow in strength and influence in the region. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish immigrant from Great Britain, and the man who would be elected Israel’s first president, orchestrated the issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, guaranteeing that Palestine would be the official homeland for the Jewish people.
Publicized in newspapers around the world, The Balfour Declaration provided the Zionist movement with widespread recognition for their goal and laid the groundwork for the establishment of the Jewish state. In 1922, both U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the U.S. Congress endorsed, the Balfour Declaration, driving newspaper and radio coverage across the world.
In 1921 the first of the Arab Riots broke out in Palestine. That led to the creation of the 1922 Churchill White Paper, and its setting immigration quotas for both Jews and Arabs. The Paper stated that no amendments could be made to the Balfour Declaration and that the Jews had the right to be in Palestine (“Jewish Palestine Mandate” 2015, May 4). The immigration quota made way for the third, fourth, and fifth migration to Palestine. By the mid-1920s, nearly one million new Jews had arrived.
These new immigrants represented a cross-section of Jewish society—from academics and artists, to tradesmen and shop owners. With their arrival in Palestine, agriculture, culture, and commerce grew. The Hebrew language also became one of the three official languages of the area, along with Arabic and English.
Next, in 1922, the Council of the League of Nations approved the British mandate for Palestine, which became official on September 29, 1923. The mandate called for the Jews and Arabs living in Palestine to prepare for self-government (McTague 1980). It was during this time that the Jewish community created many of its governing and social support institutions.
One of these institutions was the Jewish Agency (JA), created to facilitate the immigration and settlement of Jews into Palestine. At the same time the Palestinians created the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) a group that represented the various Arab factions (Morris 2008). The AHC wanted the end of the British mandate and Palestinian Independence under Arab rule. As the Jewish population of Palestine grew, so did tension and conflict with the Arabs, who felt Palestine was their homeland as well.
World War II
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime came to power in Germany they waged a relentless propaganda campaign to build even greater hostility against the Jews of Europe. Reich (2008, p. 34) notes that Hitler’s plan was to “liquidate the European Jewish community” and to create a true, pure Aryan race. The Holocaust eventually took the lives of more than six million Jews, virtually wiping out 2000 years of European Jewry.
By the end of the war, most Jewish survivors had lost their families, their homes, their jobs, essentially all their worldly goods. Where were they to go now? Media relations campaigns waged by the Jewish aid groups, newspapers, radio, and newsreels urged them to seek refuge in what was now their official homeland—Palestine.
But there was a problem. The British immigration quotas were far smaller than the number of Jews displaced by the war. As a result, many Jews became refugees, and the Zionist cause needed help. They found it in the work of the JA.
The Jewish Agency and Propaganda
Working with the JA, the international press—including newsreels, radio, and print—gave daily coverage of the plight of the displaced Jewish refugees. As the internationally recognized, official mouthpiece of the Zionist movement, the JA led the effort in garnering western media support for the Zionist cause (Goodman 2011).
From the very beginning of its public relations operation, the JA used sophisticated media relations to garner political and financial support from the wealthy elite—both Jews and non-Jews. In 1934, the JA founded its own news agency, the “Palestine Correspondence Agency,” known simply as Palcor (Goodman 2011). After the outbreak of World War II the JA established a special department, the Hasbara, to disseminate positive stories. Led by Isaiah Klinov, a former journalist for the daily newspaper, Ha’aretz and supervised by the JA’s political department (Ben-Shalom 2014), the Hasbara provided ready-to-print press materials to media stationed in Palestine, Europe, the United States, and around the world.
The JA worked with reporters to build greater understanding for the Zionist cause. It gave reporters close-up, high-level access to watch and write personal accounts of refugee efforts to reach Palestine’s shores. For instance, JA brought a Pro-Zionist Reuters reporter, Jon Kimche, to witness a successful disembarkation of Holocaust survivors “in the dark of night on a deserted beach near Nahariya in the north of Palestine” in 1945 (Goodman 2011, p. 4). His dramatic, first-person observations of a refugee transport were printed widely in the British press, producing sympathetic responses around the world.
Supporting the JA’s press relations strategies was the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization that later became the core of the Israeli Defense Forces. They printed their own dramatic refugee stories in pamphlets, and distributed them to the press worldwide. Haganah also ran its own 10-minute daily radio broadcast, Voice of Israel, which was often quoted in the Anglo-American Press. Newspapers like Hebrew Press and the Palestine Post also served as assets to the JA campaign, furnishing the foreign press with information favorable to the refugee cause.
The Ship that Launched a Nation
The cultivation of the Zionist movement and the fight for a Jewish state all came together in 1947. A ship named the Exodus, acquired by the Haganah, set sailed for Marseille, France on July 11, 1947. On the ship were 4,500 refugees, including 655 children (“Exodus 1947” 2015). These passengers were survivors who came from the ashes of the Holocaust with nowhere else in the world to go.
Their voyage aboard the Exodus lasted seven days. As the ship approached the port city of Haifa, just miles from the Palestine shore, the British Navy abruptly boarded the deck, preventing the refugees from entering the country. Hundreds of the passengers rebelled. Three people were killed, including one crewmember, and dozens were injured. The British took control of the ship and brought it to port.
Journalists and cameramen were standing by as the exhausted passengers disembarked. Reporters aired live play-by-play broadcasts to radio stations around the world. Photographers and film producers recorded dozens of dramatic, heart-wrenching images, absorbed by an international audience over the next few days. The world’s leading journalists covered the Exodus story, as well, with moving, first-person accounts sent over the wire services and published by papers around the globe.
Most of the accounts, photos, and films showed hundreds of bedraggled, malnourished people who had (miraculously) survived the death camps. Now, as the world looked on, they were once again being attacked, hurt, and gathered up to be sent away (Trescott 2007). People around the world watched these events unfold day after day.
Prior to the Exodus incident, the British had been sending illegal Palestinian immigrants to detention centers in Cyprus. But to discourage others planning to immigrate to Palestine they loaded the Exodus passengers onto three ships and sent back them to Marseille, France. Once there, the women and children disembarked, but the men refused. They remained on the ship for two months living in deplorable conditions (“Exodus 1947” 2014, June 14).
Eventually on August 22, 1947, the ship sailed for the port of Hamburg, where passengers were forcibly taken off and transported to two camps near Lubeck, Germany. Fortunately, the JA made sure journalists were there to witness the events firsthand. Their reports caused panic across the world.
When photos of the refugees—again surrounded by barbed wire—surfaced in the newspapers and newsreels, the public was outraged. Were the Jews being forced by the British back into concentration camps? Hundreds of protests sprang up around the world, in Europe, Palestine, and the United States. This was surely not the public reaction the British planned on.
The Jews captured the world’s sympathy, while the British were the target of scorn and shame. It was a public relations battle the United Kingdom could never win. To resolve the issue, the British government handed over “the question of Palestine” to the United Nations (“War, Peace, & Politics: UN Partition Plan” 2015). The United Nations appointed a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to handle the situation. After three months of investigation and hearings in 1947 (Haron 1980, p. 178) they created the Partition Resolution of 1947 (UN General Assembly Resolution 181, as cited in Nasrallah 2011). The Resolution, passed on November 29, 1947, recommended that Palestine be divided into both a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem remaining neutral, and under international trusteeship.
The UN vote, carried live to anxious listeners around the world, was one of the first politically significant activities by the newly created body. Millions listened as each member country was called on to voice their vote for or against granting statehood status to Palestine. In living rooms and parlors in every country that broadcast radio could reach, listeners kept track as each “yay,” “nay,” or abstention was cast. The final tally at the General Assembly: 33 countries voted in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstaining. Against all odds, the State of Israel was born (Haron 1980, p. 178).
On May 14, 1948, one day before the British mandate was set to expire, Israel declared its independence. The Zionist movement, a dream of one lone reporter in France, finally achieved what the world thought impossible. The Jewish people now finally had a country where they could live free from anti-Semitism.
Conclusion
Public relations strategies and tactics played an enormous role in the creation of the Jewish State. From the sensationalist press coverage of the Dreyfus Affair, through the crisis of the Exodus, communications galvanized public opinion, created the Zionist Movement, and kept the issue alive.
This chapter shows the strong links between behavior and communication in making an emotional connection to the public. No doubt, had a contemporary public relations expert been present when the Exodus docked at Haifa, he or she would have warned the British about the reputational damage their behavior would cause, especially with the press there to report firsthand. The “optics” of that incident did not bode well for the British cause; Americans especially, owing to their long-standing friendship with the United Kingdom, felt betrayed and deceived, their trust shaken.
The reporting ignited strong anti-British sentiment around the world. But at the same it made the world finally understand why Israel needed to exist.
Takeaway
The old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” remains true for many social movements. The photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; the images of young women jumping out of windows at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; the nightly TV coverage of Occupy Wall Street all indelibly inscribed themselves in our memories. They can evoke far more powerful emotions than any other device.
But there was one social movement whose images meant life or death for thousands, and became the deciding factor in the fate of a nation. After all, the Zionist movement, which led to the formation of the State of Israel, could not exist without consent of the world community. While the Jewish Agency disseminated many logical reasons for the creation of Israel, the emotion appeal in the form of human-to-human connection finally changed the minds of those most against it, and led to the necessary number of yea votes at the United Nations.
One could be, in principle, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. But it is hard for any human being—especially by the end of a war—to sustain those feelings after seeing the skeletal Holocaust survivors denied entry to their “homeland.” The Jewish Agency, and the many sympathetic journalists, filmmakers, and photographers it serviced, needed barely a cutline to describe what was happening aboard the Exodus.
Many organizations, brands, and commodities groups use a “news bureau” today to disseminate correct information about their products, services, and ideas. Like modern day news bureaus, the JA was responsible for disseminating news and photos. It used the power of the press to communicate the facts, and turn the tide of public opinion.
What they didn’t know at the time was that their work would so quickly turn the tide of public opinion in what was one of the most important events of the 20th century.
This may well be the most powerful media relations story in history.