Israel's Public Diplomacy by Cummings Jonathan;

Author:Cummings, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

He went on to announce reforms that would remove the distinction between internal and domestic information efforts and that such an effort would require financial resources “quite different from those with which we are familiar.”[41] Some interpreted Galili’s speech as a call for the establishment of a separate ministry of information and that he was responding to criticism of his effectiveness.[42] Perhaps in response to this, he returned to the Knesset for an important point of clarification: “Members of Knesset, I wish to remind you that the Knesset and the government never decided to establish a Ministry of Information that deals with activities within Israel, in the Jewish world and the world at large, domestically and internationally.”[43] Neither Galili nor Peled believed that government information efforts could, or should, be the work of a government ministry.

In November, the commission issued its final report. Writing to the Ministerial Committee on Information that ordered the inquiry, Elad Peled indicated the five major findings of the report:

The commission took a view that the accusation of absolute “failures of information policy” levelled against the Israeli information apparatus is fundamentally over-stated. It is a combination of criticism of policy or lack of policy, together with an objective difficulty in explaining to the world certain Israeli interests. In the body of the report, we have tried to elaborate on some of the difficulties this presents.

The commission came to understand that a special ministry for government information exists today only in totalitarian regimes, and is a byword for “propaganda” in those countries. As a democracy, the State of Israel would find it difficult to adopt such a model.

The commission found it appropriate to recommend the establishment of an Information Authority, within the Prime Minister’s Office. Its responsibilities would be the dissemination of government information for international and domestic audiences, whilst implementation would be in the hands of different bodies.

We found that, despite the considerable efforts in improving the apparatus of government information work and its activities, both in the Foreign Ministry and the Information Service of the Prime Minister’s Office, there are still defects of organisation, working practice and methods of information dissemination. We have presented our principal findings in this regard and have recommended organisational and operational changes.

We take the view that the upswing in overseas information efforts requires larger budgets, appropriate recruitment of professional staff and some disconnection from the limitations of the government pay scale in order to do so.[44]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.