Overview

Israeli hasbara (explaining), its variant of public diplomacy, is the subject of endless domestic debate. Israel of the 1960s and 70s saw many changes on its political and military international stage. This was a period of unusually intensive attention to the problems of hasbara. This period begins with the appointment of Yisrael Galili as minister with responsibility for hasbara and ends with the dismantling of the Ministry of Information that had been created, in haste, in 1974. Israel had only been able to "muddle through" and, at the end, there was no greater sophistication in Israeli thinking on the subject and no stronger administrative structure in spite of many organizational changes. Accessible to anyone interested in the history of Israel as well as political history and diplomacy, the book serves as a case study of how entrenched political culture can limit policy options and casts light on the emergence of public diplomacy as a feature of foreign policy.