CZA: Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem

This book is based on research undertaken at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and so my first thanks are for the indefatigable efforts of Dr. Kirsten Schulze. Wielding both carrot and stick, she guided, cajoled, and wheedled me to see this project through. She has my deepest thanks for doing so.

“The Israeli public relates to the problems of hasbara, particularly at times of crisis and danger, in a way that seems to have become a matter of obsession which is not easy to explain. In any event, it has no parallel in any other country in the world,” wrote Professor Yehezkel Dror as...

Zionism conceived of itself as a decisive break with the history of the Jewish people, an entirely novel method of displacing the isolation and particularism of the past and rejoining history by resetting Jewish life in modern ideological constructs. In the words of Nahum Goldmann, “Everything has changed. Our...

With the retirement of Ben-Gurion from front-line politics in 1963, a new phase of Israeli government communication policy could begin.On the transition from Ben-Gurion to Eshkol, see Shalom, Z. (2006). Ben-Gurion’s political struggles, 1963–1967: a lion in winter. London: Routledge,...

In May 1968, Israel celebrated the twentieth anniversary of independence. The event was marked by a military parade through the streets of Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers...

Immediately after the end of the Six Day War, minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili acknowledged that there was room for an overhaul of the government’s information infrastructure. Speaking to the Knesset in July, he acknowledged, “The...

Shelving Elad Peled’s central recommendation to create an information authority, Israel in the early 1970s again moved away from formalizing government policy on communications and closer to a now characteristic “muddling through” of...

On December 1, 1973, David-Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, died. This was more than the passing of a leader; it was the end of a political era. As Israel struggled to comprehend the enormity of the 1973 war, Golda Meir found herself the last of the “founders’ generation.” Although she narrowly won the elections held after the war, she would soon hand over power...

Hasbara, Israel’s approach of communicating its national image to international audiences, is an “imperfect lens” through which to see the world. The essentially defensive and passive nature of the political culture of hasbara hampered decision making at critical points in Israel’s history. Thus, it is the failures rather than successes of the three...

Interviews held by the committee in full or by subcommittees:

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Jonathan Cummings is a political analyst and policy adviser whose work focuses on Israel’s foreign relations. He established the Israel office of BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) and was a parliamentary assistant at the Knesset, a research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, and an intelligence officer in the Israel...