U.S. Marketing Companies Are Helping To Rebrand The Genocide In Gaza

Reports say PR teams are busy rewriting history in real time – not that the American media needs the help

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

You’ve heard that one before, but here’s a new version of the thought experiment: if a genocide takes place but you prevent foreign journalists from observing it, kill the key witnesses and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, then will anyone care?

Israel’s far-right government, and its many allies in the US, are betting the answer to that question is “no”. As I write this, Israel is razing Gaza City to the ground in the latest stage of what many respected international human rights organizations and scholars have called a genocide. There aren’t as many images coming out of Gaza City as there should be because the Israeli military is still not allowing foreign reporters free access to Gaza and has murdered many of the journalists in the ground. In August, Al Jazeera’s team in Gaza City were deliberately targeted by Israel.

Nature abhors a vacuum, but propagandists love it. As Gaza burns and information coming out of the strip is deliberately limited, highly paid marketers and PR people in multinational firms are busy rewriting history in real time. Earlier this month, Drop Site News, which has done essential work on Gaza, reported that an American polling firm called Stagwell Global, founded by Mark Penn, was commissioned by Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs to rehabilitate Israel’s global image. Penn, for the uninitiated, is a pollster who facilitated Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 and then helped Hillary Clinton lose to Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries with a combination of hubris and racist stereotyping. “The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” Penn wrote in a Clinton campaign memo. He also proposed characterizing Obama as un-American. (Stagwell told Adweek the work in Israel was run by a “small team” and that its agencies work “across the political and issue spectrum”. Last week, a spokesperson told PRWeek the work was a “defined project with a specific brief” that had now concluded.)