RESCUING ISRAEL’S IMAGE IN THE RUBBLE OF HAITI
By Ayala Tsoref
Ha’aretz
Mon., January 25, 2010
"One day last week, while driving through Port-au-Prince, two
people ran up to us," says Amos Radian, Israel’s ambassador to the
Dominican Republic, who has been coordinating Israeli aid to the
earthquake-stricken island nation of Haiti. The security officer
thought they were under attack, but the "assailants" turned out to
be British correspondents from the Sun and the Mirror. They’d seen
the Israeli flag on the car and having heard about the field hospital
Israel had set up, wanted to be taken to it, Radian says.
It’s a nice change for foreign correspondents to be chasing Israeli
representatives for positive reasons.
For years Israel has been depicted as brutal and inhuman, but the tone
changed last week, with media coverage focused on the hospital Israel
had put up – enabling complex surgery under field conditions, and even
sporting facilities for birthing and for premature babies. MSNBC for
instance, which broadcasts to some 78 million households in the United
States, sang the Israeli team’s praise, noting the chaos and collapse
of communications. The Israelis were the exception, MSNBC reported:
Their 747 landed at the airport, with the Israelis immediately
unloading equipment to set up a state-of-the-art field hospital.
Exactly as one might expect of Israelis, the cable news channel gushed,
their arrival was efficient, thorough and well-managed, and they got
down to work straightaway.
When MSNBC’s anchor wondered why the Israelis were more organized than
the Americans, the reporter on the ground in Haiti answered that the
Israelis had arrived far more prepared than the other rescue teams.
Within hours they had operating theatres up and running, she said.
CNN reported much the same and even asked an American general how
a tiny nation like Israel managed to do what no other delegation to
Haiti had.
Radian himself trekked through the debris, from one improvised
clinic to another, urging that the worst cases be sent to the Israeli
hospital, as it had the best care available in Haiti, he explains.
"It’s gotten so reporters wandering between the camps come to me,
telling me about tough cases in other camps – such as a woman needing
an urgent Cesarean section. They ask if they can send Israeli teams
in," he says.
The army estimates the cost of the Haiti operation for last week
alone at NIS 30 million, three-quarters of what Jerusalem spent on
its image in 2009. Of that, NIS 10 million went toward building and
the use of satellite communications; the same was spent on sending
over the Jumbo jets with the medical equipment. Each day the 230-man
medical team is there costs more than NIS 1.5 million, not including
communication costs.
As the army spokesman put it, cost becomes secondary on a humanitarian
mission like this.
Beyond rescuing lives, the Israeli team in Haiti is also helping to
rescue Israel’s image in both the press and diplomatic circles. "I
ran into the Japanese ambassador at one of the ruined sites and told
him about the hospital," says Radian. "An hour later he’d brought the
entire Japanese delegation over to come and learn. The Colombian army
asked to append their operating theatre, with 16 surgeons, to our
camp. Now our camp has the Israeli flag, the Red Cross flag and the
Colombian flag. Israeli, Colombian and British teams are operating
together at our camp, which has increased from 230 to 300 people."
No one at the airport could have missed the Israelis’ arrival. "Two
El Al jets with the Israeli flag on their tails landed… Two hundred
and thirty Israeli soldiers disembarked, and who guarded them en route?
Jordanian armored vehicles. It was surreal," says Radian.
One critic of the Israeli effort is Yoel Donchin, head of patient
safety at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem in Jerusalem. In
an article published on Ynet, he wrote that what the Haitians need
most isn’t a field hospital, but field toilets. More than they need
doctors, he said, they need bulldozers to dig sewage lines.
"A country seeking to bring humanitarian aid, without thinking about
its image, should send what the victims need, not what it wants to
give," Donchin wrote. But would the news programs cover an Israeli
commander next to a site with 500 chemical toilets? Hospitals with
devoted doctors and nurses bearing the Star of David are sexier,
he concluded.
Yossi Levy of the Foreign Ministry dismisses the charge that it’s all
a public relations stunt. "We sent the best of our people – not to get
[good PR], but to save lives," he says. After years of bad images,
he adds, the photographs of the Israeli hospital speak for themselves.
Even the Guardian, not known for its pro-Israeli coverage, was
adulatory.
After foreign journalists started to crowd the field hospital, the army
set up procedures to handle them, says Matan Greenberg, soldier and
spokesman for the delegation. They are met by a colonel who explains
how Israel’s Home Front Command and rescue teams work. They meet with
the hospital commander, who reviews what happened that day events. They
can tour the tents, says Greenberg, and are finally brought to a tent
that offers satellite Internet communication, a precious commodity
in the disaster zone. The army PR team in Haiti even has press kits
ready to go.
Is the Arab press also covering the Israeli activity in Haiti?
"We tried to attract Arab papers. We invited them, but they didn’t
come," says Greenberg. "But there are a lot of [press] teams from
Europe [covering our work]."
Israel has previously sent rescue teams to Turkey, Armenia, India,
Kenya and Thailand – the latter after the 2004 tsunami. Coverage was
adulatory in all cases, but the applause waned quickly. The chill in
Israeli-Turkish relations these days demonstrates just how short that
appreciation can last.
"We have no illusions," says Levy. They know the positive coverage
won’t last; Israel will again be portrayed as Goliath. But the
Foreign Ministry is convinced that the positive reports will still
help Israeli economic interests.
"The fact that [U.S. Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton mentioned
us in her speech is of the utmost importance," says image consultant
Roni Rimon. "As long as Israel leverages [the positive coverage],
it will last."
His advice (long stated but never taken): Israel should buy ad space
in the foreign press and on Web sites, where it could publish images
and clips from its Haitian rescue mission. That said, "This is one of
the few times I don’t feel things should have been done differently,"
Rimon says. "As an adviser, I would advise them to keep doing exactly
what they’re doing."