Hasbara videо: The imaginative world of deputy FM Ayalon (UPDATED)

Dimi Reider By Dimi Reider July 18, 2011 | Edit

So this is where deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon exists: In a vast white space populated by magically appearing and reappearing figments of his imagination. Why am I not surprised.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGYxLWUKwWo[/youtube]

I wonder if the comment about Israel not trying to occupy the Kingdom of Jordan  being a “painful compromise” is the official position of the Foreign Ministry, and if so, what do their Jordanian counterparts think of the image of all of Jordan with the Star of David on it. Hmm.

Update: The video appears to be lifted straight off an earlier and equally ludicrous campaign by the flagship settler organization, the Yesha council. Take a look:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OV_8HiO1HA[/youtube]

Yesha itself rather happily announced in a mass email today that “The Foreign Ministry has endorsed the Yesha Council’s information line by using our information video starring Golan Azoulai.” In the next few hours they seem to have gotten a lot of very angry phone calls, because later today they released the following clarification: “Following several questions that were addressed to us,  we’d like to clarify that beyond the use of the central idea of the clip, there is no official relationship between the Yesha Council and the new clip [sic], which was produced without our knowledge.”

This merits a fistful of observation:  How can an organization engage in a relationship with a clip? Does it being unofficial mean the Yesha Council and the new clip are just kinda dating from time to time? Also, “there’s no connection except the central idea” must be one of the weakest denials of the year.

The key issue here is that it seems the Foreign Ministry has adapted the ultra-expansionist views of the Yesha Council, wholesale.

Dimi Reider

Dimi (Dmitry) Reider is an Israeli journalist.  His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books,  The New York Times,The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Haaretz,  Jerusalem Post, and  Index on Censorship. "Dimi's Notes" has been quoted and referenced by the following publications:

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