While dispensing with work permits crucial to aid work in the Palestinian territories Israel has been noisily trumpeting its own relief efforts — thousands of miles away in Haiti.
Israel’s image-burnishing efforts there stand in marked contrast to the barriers it is now throwing up to the same aid organisations it is sweating alongside in the rubble.
The work of Israeli doctors at an emergency field hospital in Port-au-Prince — where a 220-strong military medical team has treated thousands in a huge field hospital — has become the subject of an e-mail campaign lauding the relief mission.
Newspapers around the world, including The Times, have been flooded with identical e-mails contrasting the criticism of Israel’s disproportionate use of military force with the scale of its response to the Haiti earthquake.
“Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza,” the e-mail says. “It is time that the world media speak of another disproportionate response from Israel.”
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Israel calls this the “hasbara war”, or the struggle to control the PR aspects of the conflicts in which it is embroiled. Having learnt that a bad press can be as damaging to its standing as bombs are to its citizens, it exerts huge efforts to put across its side of the story. The struggle has reached a higher pitch this year in the wake of the Goldstone report into the war in Gaza, in which a UN investigator said that Israel and Hamas committed war crimes.
Yesterday the UN drew a comparison between the situations in Haiti and Gaza, noting that while the quake was an act of God, the collapse of Gaza’s health care system was the consequence of Israel’s man-made blockage.