Alternative Information Center - The Alternative Information Center Sends Letter to the British PR Firm Acanchi, Regarding its Campaign with the Israeli Foreign Ministry

The Alternative Information Center (AIC) wrote a critical letter to the British PR firm, Acanchi, which was hired by the Israeli Foreign Ministry for a new campaign to give Israel a public relations facelift.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that you and the company you founded, Acanchi, have been hired by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to develop a brand for Israel that is “disconnected from the Arab-Israeli conflict […] (and) that focuses instead on Israel’s scientific and cultural achievements.” As a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization working for a just peace and secure life for Palestinians and Israelis, we are most concerned by this report.

Acanchi’s website notes that you embark on a “rigourous journey of discovery” when defining a brand for a country. We trust that comprehensive research methodology dictated that this journey included meetings with representatives of the more than 5.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, in addition to the 25,000 residents of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. It is impossible to understand our local reality without meeting with Palestinian civil society and political leaders.

For more than 40 years, Israel has violated the most fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people—their right to life, freedom of movement, freedom of association and the right to their own sovereign state. These ongoing human rights violations are implemented through the violent force of the Israeli military and the crushing bureaucracy of the Israeli “civil administration” that governs the occupied Palestinian territories.

This is the reality in which we live. There is obviously more to Israeli society and its daily experiences than the occupation of the Palestinian territories, but the occupation is the shadow under which everything else necessarily exists.

By acting to associate Israel with things other than the Israeli-Arab conflict, you would unfortunately be directly contributing to the ongoing violations of Palestinian human rights and a prolongation of the conflict. Until we all—Israelis, Palestinians and the international community—deal with reality here as it truly is and not as public relations campaigns may like it to be, we have no chance to create a just and secure peace in the region.

Accordingly, the Alternative Information Center (AIC) (www.alternativenews.org) would be pleased to arrange meetings and discussion for you and your staff with various representatives of Palestinian grassroots civil society, in addition to Israeli and Palestinians working together for peace and justice and marginalized Israeli communities impoverished by global trends and political processes that do not take their voices into account.

Without peace and justice for everyone in the region, there can be no true prosperity and development for either Israelis or Palestinians.