Neve Gordon

Since the publication of his UN report charging Israel (and Hamas) with war crimes, Richard Goldstone has been subjected to a well-orchestrated delegitimisation campaign by Israel. Most recently, new 'revealing information’ was disseminated to the press, accusing the Jewish Zionist South African judge of sentencing 28 black South Africans to death during the apartheid years. 'The judge who sentenced black people to death,' said the speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, ‘should not be allowed to lecture a democratic state defending itself against terrorists.'

The ongoing character assassination of Goldstone isn't an isolated case, but should be seen as part of a large-scale state-branding exercise by Israel. In 2004, the Foreign Ministry hired a number of international PR firms to improve Israel's global reputation. In the words of Ido Aharoni, the head of the ministry's brand management team:

In Israel, almost all of the protests against the navy’s assault on the relief flotilla took place in Palestinian space. Palestinian citizens in almost every major town and city, from Nazareth to Sachnin and from Arabe to Shfaram, demonstrated against the assault that left nine people dead and many more wounded. The one-day general strike called for by the Palestinian leadership within Israel was, for the most part, adhered to only by Arab citizens. In Jewish space, by contrast, business continued as usual.

Last week, Israel permitted the transport of jam, halva and shaving razors into Gaza. Since September 2007, goods entering Gaza had been limited to a 'humanitarian minimum' of approximately 70 items of foodstuffs and medicines (4000 items were allowed in before the blockade). During a visit to Gaza in February 2009, John Kerry discovered that Israel had banned pasta but not rice, because the latter was considered a necessity while the former was a luxury.

Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv claims to be the largest university in Israel. Its official goal is to cultivate and combine ‘Jewish identity and tradition with modern technologies and research’. Fifteen years ago, after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by one of its students, the university set out to temper its right-wing tendencies and become a more liberal institution guided by ostensibly neutral professional procedures and regulations. Bar-Ilan may have continued to provide accreditation for two colleges in illegal West Bank settlements, but it also developed an excellent gender studies programme and hired a number of left-wing academics.

Would Meryl Streep, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon be willing to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States and its policies in order to receive public funding for feature films that they star in, direct or produce? In Israel, the far-right Knesset member Michael Ben Ari has proposed a bill that would require entire film crews to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and to declare loyalty to its laws and symbols, as a condition for receiving public funding. It’s just one of more than ten bills to be discussed during the Knesset’s winter session that several commentators in Ha’aretz have characterised as proto-fascist.