
Ben Smith made a smart catch the other day during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech to AIPAC:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today that new media techology increases the urgency of Israel's moving toward a two-state solution in order to "undermine the appeal of extremism across the region.""We cannot escape the impact of mass communication. We cannot control the images and the messages that are conveyed. We can only change the facts on the ground that refute the claims of the rejectionists and extremists, and in so doing create the circumstances for a safe, secure future for Israel," Clinton said in a riff that doesn't appear in her prepared remarks to the pro-Israel group AIPAC.
This is a really interesting point to hear from Clinton, one that has broader implications beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We've all heard the argument that, separate from economic data that suggests an increasingly multilateral globe, the increasing freedom of information has changed the balance of power. This both empowers citizens, whether through Iranian Twitter or American YouTube outreach, and can hurt them, as with the Egyptian intelligence agencies tracking dissidents on Facebook. Either way, it reduces the advantage that the United States has in influencing other governments -- unless, as Clinton does here, you can bend the phenomenon to encourage an ally to change course and take responsibility for its behavior. It also makes it hard to brush aside Israel's continuing intransigence on settlements -- everything is in the clear, now.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the ongoing linkage debate over how important the Middle East Peace Process is to other U.S. interests in the region. Perhaps those who argue that Israel-Palestine issues are separate from the rest of our interests in the Middle East, whether that is combating extremist political movement or dealing with Iran, were at one time right about the limited salience of the issue. Now, though, the prevalence of images from the conflict has increased its international impact, making the linkage argument much more powerful than it perhaps used to be.
Similarly, the U.S. cannot escape the impact of mass communication, which should reinforce our own willingness to do the right thing on controversial issues of international public impact, especially in the area of human rights. While growing public diplomacy efforts are key to framing the portrayal of the U.S. around the world, even the best communications strategy can't fix problems in the product.
-- Tim Fernholz
Image of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank found, where else, on Flickr.