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Friday June 29, 2007

Sexy women won’t sell a state

by jonathan tobin

Amid concerns over the Hamas coup in Gaza this month, some Jews found something different to worry about instead of the question of whether Islamist killers were closer to their goal of annihilating the state of Israel.

An unlikely alliance of Orthodox Jews and feminists were dismayed that Israel’s New York City consulate assisted an American “men’s magazine” in getting female soldiers to reveal a great deal of flesh for its photographers in front of scenic backdrops. Even worse, Israel’s diplomats in the Big Apple helped promote the photo spread at an official reception in honor of Maxim magazine.

Susan Weidman Schneider, editor-in-chief of Lilith, the journal most closely associated with Jewish feminism, denounced the consulate’s involvement as “sexist.” Some Orthodox Jews denounced the project as demonstrating a shameful lack of morality. The Knesset even threatened an emergency meeting to deal with this shandah.

In response, both consulate officials and cover girl Gal Gadot — Miss Israel 2004 and a former Israel Defense Force fitness instructor (who demonstrated her own brand of fitness in a bikini and high heels in a photo splashed across the cover of the New York Post) — responded to the brouhaha as if critics were not only hopeless squares, but also ignorant of the impact that Ms. Gadot’s lithe form could have on Israel’s public-relations problems in this country.

David Saranga, Israel’s consul for media and public affairs in the media capital of the world, told JTA that Maxim is a “serious magazine,” and that his job is “to promote Israel as a normal country, particularly among the magazine’s young male readership.”

Alas, I am such a policy wonk that I don’t read Maxim, so I can neither confirm nor deny its “seriousness.” Informed sources tell me it’s not as explicit as others in this genre, so perhaps we should take Saranga at his word on that point.

But I was once a young male, and I’m sure that the origin of pretty girls whose pictures my generation leered at had no impact on our opinions about politics, domestic or foreign. I doubt that it’s much different for Maxim’s readers today.

Granted, if Maxim’s audience was presented with dueling photo essays of Gazans in burqas and Israelis in skimpy swimwear, I suppose they might decide Israel would be more entitled to most-favored nation trading status than a putative Palestine.

But the real problem is not the consulate’s lack of concern for the dignity of their country. It is the notion that people will be more willing to help Israel if they think its people are sexy. It’s no different for those who think Americans will support the Jewish state if they know how smart Israelis are.

The Israel21c campaign, which aided the Maxim project along with the consulate, helps promote Israel’s image as a high-tech wonderland full of academics and entrepreneurs who are curing diseases and building the modern equivalent of the better mousetrap, thereby prompting the world to beat a path to its door.

The stories they circulate are nice. But as long as the lies about Israel’s supposed cruelty and responsibility for the continuation of the conflict with the Palestinians and the mess in the Middle East in general are being given a serious hearing, all efforts to change the topic to how clever Israelis are or how cute their women are will be a waste of time.

Take, for example, the cover story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday, June 24 about the economic and cultural gap between the West Bank and Gaza. While its facts about the backwardness of Gaza were indisputable, the causes for this gap, presented almost in passing, were put down largely to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the restrictions on travel imposed by Israel and the number of refugees in each area.

Unmentioned in the otherwise unexceptionable piece were the causes of the 1949 armistice lines (an Arab refusal to accept statehood alongside a Jewish state), the reasons for the restrictions (the widely popular Palestinian cultural practice of supporting terrorism, especially suicide bombing), and the refusal of the Palestinians and the Arab world to resettle their refugees, as the Jews did theirs after 1949.

Witness also the decision last week of both the New York Times and the Washington Post to give space on their op-ed pages to spokesmen for Hamas. If terrorists whose goal is the annihilation of Israel are now part of the national conversation, what’s wrong is not the lack of exposure of Israeli bodies, but of arguments that its cause is just and that its enemies are vile Islamist Holocaust-denying murderers.

Most Israelis support territorial compromise so long as they get peace in return. But their diplomats have spent so much effort either whitewashing their supposed peace partners (as they did for Yasser Arafat during the heyday of Oslo) or propping them up (as they are doing now for Mahmoud Abbas) that it is no longer clear to many Westerners that what is at stake is the right of the Jews to their own country, not the supposed right of Palestinians to destroy it to achieve sovereignty themselves.

They allowed the dialogue on the Middle East to be one that balanced Palestinian “rights” against Israeli “security,” forgetting that the former will always trump the latter in the court of public opinion.

If Israel’s envoys want to catch the imagination of American youth, they need to forget about the cheesecake. The bad press their country gets is based on unchallenged pro-Arab propaganda and a lack of advocacy for the rights of Jews, not foreign skin rags getting access to its prettiest women.

Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. He can be contacted at jtobin@jewishexponent.com.

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