MICHAEL D. KIRKPATRICK
Opinions Writer

In the world of marketing, nation branding has come into vogue in recent decades.

Branding, as Naomi Klein is wont to point out, is not the same thing as advertising. Rather than selling a commodity, branding seeks to sell an image of a company to consumers.

When applied to countries, such public relations spin becomes nation branding — a concept popularized by “theorists” such as Simon Anholt. However, in applying image-selling to the nation-state, the line between marketing and propaganda is blurred. Perhaps, herein lies its appeal.

Amir Gissin, Israel’s consul-general to Canada, spoke at the Edwards School of Business shortly before the Christmas break about “Market Branding Israel to the World.” Gissin was interested in casting aside “political” discussion of Israeli actions in the occupied territories and Lebanon, instead examining the process of manufacturing a brand image of Israel.

As Israel’s first brand manager, Gissin has been instrumental in repackaging his country’s image abroad. He explained to the formally-clad business students assembled that “a brand is a promise — and a good brand is a promise delivered.”

By way of analogy, Gissin pointed out that like Coca-Cola, countries require a marketing team to sell their brand image. In the case of nation-states, branding teams need to look inward to discover “how we are when we are at our best.” In order to do so, however, countries must also detract attention from less-flattering aspects of their existence. So, just as Coca-Cola has been implicated with death-squads murdering unionists at their bottling plants in Central America, states, too, need to divert criticism that deters from their brand image. Those moments when we are not at our best are to be swept aside.

While it is shocking that the Edwards School of Business would host an event that required RCMP security clearances and background checks on students, the controversial topic should not come as such a surprise. Indeed, marketing and propaganda (as nation-branding may have been called in less deceitful times) have a long, shared history. Early 20th century marketers recognized that advertising could be a tool seized both by industrialists and retailers to hawk their wares and by states for the “manufacture of consent,” to borrow a term from Walter Lippman.

Gissin explained that the problem is not Israel’s actions in the Middle East but that people are more content to draw conclusions based on simple imagery than by examining the facts. The Israeli “quarrel” with Palestinians, Gissin argued, stems not from land ownership but rather from the right to possessing the narrative of victimhood.

Much to his chagrin, Gissin laments the iconic imagery of young Palestinian boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks in the occupied territories. So convinced is he that Israel is right, Gissin insists, “the tanks are the victims.” The death count of the Second Intifada — the Palestinian uprising from 2000 until roughly 2005 to cast the Israel Defense Forces and settlers out of the Palestinian territories — has been estimated to be 1,100 Israeli dead and 5,500 Palestinian. And yet, says Gissin, the tanks are the victims.

In the branding war, human life is cast aside by the importance of images; indeed when reputation is at stake, the truth is merely collateral damage.

Instead of claiming a victim narrative so easily discredited by images, Gissin argued as the Director of Israel’s Public Affairs Department that Israel needed a new brand. In time, his team came up with a set of related concepts that they felt essentially fit Israel’s diverse population—“how we are when we are at our best”: “passion,” “innovation and creativity,” and “fusion.”

Within such concepts lay a homogenizing element that encapsulated the Israeli character. Others in Israel disagreed. Hard-line opinion — voiced in the leading newspaper Haaretz, for example —suggested that the branding campaign was too secular (not “Jewish” enough) and ignored that the Israeli government defined itself as a Jewish state.

However, perhaps the fundamental problem in Gissin’s mission is more systemic. Passion, innovation and creativity, and fusion? None of these make any sense in a meaningful way when in the shadow of Israeli state crimes. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is one of the longest in modern history; Israel spends more per capita on “defence” than any other country, and boasts one of the largest military expenditures as a percentage of GDP in the world. In light of this, who, besides Mr. Gissin, cares whether Israeli-made microcomputers serve as the “heart” of the Canadian-made BlackBerry?

Near the end of his lecture, Gissin expressed interest in the forging of Canadian identity at particular moments in history, most recently at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. He insisted that something changed for the positive in the Canadian psyche when the men’s hockey team won gold against the U.S., something that contributed to a positive national brand image.

But do we learn much about Canadian values in such moments?

Or do we learn more about Canada when we consider Parliament’s unwillingness to place checks on Canadian mining companies operating in Central America, the illegal occupation of Afghanistan, the training of paramilitary forces in Haiti, the greatest mass arrest in Canadian history during the G20 summit in Toronto this past summer, or in a lack of public or media concern for missing First Nations women?

Marketing necessarily involves a degree of fetishism that masks unsavoury elements of production, distribution and the division of labour. Such deception hides Coca-Cola’s relationship to paramilitary forces as much as nation-branding obscures Israeli state crimes. It indicates no more than what notions of the hockey-loving and peace-keeping Canadian character tell us about ourselves.

For Israel or any other country interested in branding itself, the question worth asking is not “how are we when we are at our best?” but rather, “how are we when we are at our worst?” For such national soul-seeking inquiries will force us to constructively criticize our collective actions and re-evaluate our place in the world.