Over the past three days, two op-eds have appeared in two of America’s largest and most respected newspapers calling for Obama to speak with the Israelis and to show even-handedness when dealing with the Middle East.

On 7/30/09, the Washington Post published an op-ed, “Tough on Israel” which calls on Preseident Barak Obama to “to show both sides that they can trust him — and he must be tough on more than one country.” continue reading…

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According to a recent blog post on Transracial, with reports from Haaretz, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced its plans to embrace social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. The government will focus less on Palestinian issues, and more on the Iranian threat.

The blog also discusses the different initiatives that the @IsraelConsulate and @DavidSaranga have taken in the field of new media.

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Created by Markus Angermeier

Lately, we have read some erroneous reports regarding the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ efforts in getting our message across Web 2.0.  First and foremost, we are proud of our efforts in getting our message across the web-o-sphere.   We were one of the first governments in the world to have an official blog (we now that two!), have a Facebook and MySpace page, and a Twitter account and we were the first government to ever hold a Twitter Citizen Press Conference!  Our venture into the web-o-sphere has been so successful that the Ministry has decided to invest more effort in this direction worldwide and to allocate a budget for building and designing more Web 2.0 sites.

At the same time, every year Israel receives thousands of calls, letters, and emails asking us how they can help Israel.  Therefore, due to the success that Israel has had in reaching the masses through Web 2.0, we have decided to encourage those that want to help Israel’s PR effort to respond to articles/letters/postings in talkbacks and write blog posts regarding Israel.  These two initiatives are not the same thing and anyone combining these two decisions are incorrect in doing so.

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On June 17th, David Saranga (@DavidSaranga), Consul for Media and Public Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York (@IsraelConsulate), addressed the 140 Character Conference (#140conf) about the use of twitter in Public Diplomacy.

Twitter “allows us to reach people and segments of society that usually we don’t reach,” @DavidSaranga explained at the conference. “There is a lot of room to include dialogue between people.”

To read more about Saranga’s speech at the #140conf, click here.

At the conference, @DavidSaranga announced the launch of twt4peace, a dialogue on twitter encouraging the discussion of topics that concern everyone: environment, minority rights, and education.

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