 All right, so thank you, welcome everyone for joining us. My name is Robert Walker, Canadian director for Hasbro Fellowships. Tonight, we're gonna be talking about how to change people's minds about Israel. When I told somebody that I was gonna be making this presentation, he said, Rob, you'd always pick the easy topics. This is, of course, one of the, we perceive this as one of the hardest topics in the world, but the truth is it shouldn't be. And I think it only speaks to the best practices that our opponents have been so successful at doing that we haven't been doing. So I'll get into this just a little bit. Just actually, before we move on to that, just a brief introduction to Hasbro Fellowships. For those of you not familiar, we're actually Canada's first campus, pro-Israel campus advocacy organization. We're a product of Asia International. We work on about 300 campuses, and we work with pro-Israel university students and train them how to be as effective as possible in advocating for Israel campus. For example, when I was a university student, I went to the University of Ottawa. I was very involved. I was the president of the Israel Awareness Committee, and we did a lot of things. We did a lot of events. We did a lot of programs. We did a lot of speakers. We were very involved. If you had asked me, if you knew me back then, you said, Robert, are you active as a pro-Israel advocate at the University of Ottawa? And I would say, absolutely I was. If you had asked me, were you effective? Well, effective, I don't know. I never occurred to me to be effective. We did a lot of programs. We did a lot of events, but effectiveness never really came into the equation, and so too for many students. There's sort of a bit of a disconnect between frequency of programming and actually the effectiveness of actions. Whereas for our opponents, this is something that is first and foremost. So we're gonna evaluate tonight a little bit of the best practices that our opponents have been so successful at identifying and where perhaps we've fallen, not perhaps where we have fallen behind a little bit, and hopefully we can catch up to them on that. So the first question is, what is the problem? We talk about how are, again, we'll step, how to change people's minds about Israel. And again, you see here, this is a comic from the very prominent Brazilian cartoonist. We have a cartoonist here in the audience, so you may be familiar with him, Carlos Latufe, very anti-Israel, very prominent anti-Israel cartoonist. And of course, you have here this little boy wearing a kafia, holding a teddy bear, being shot by an Israeli patchy helicopter gunship. And we laugh at this, we say this is ridiculous. Of course, you'll see the security barrier, the so-called apartheid wall surrounding him, but this is one of the most iconic images of the war. We'll go over a couple more iconic images of the conflict, Arab-Israeli conflict as well. But the whole idea is, in your average person's mind, we talk about not pro-Israel and not anti-Israel. We'll talk about the different numbers as well. Your average person, this is an image that is embedded in a lot of people's minds, particularly during last summer's war, even as bizarrely as it sounds now, the stabbing and bombing and car-ramming incidents in Israel, the image is still that Israel is the occupier, that Israel is still the one using the excessive force and so on. So how are we gonna change people's minds? First question is we have to ask ourselves, what is the problem? This is a picture of anybody who's familiar with this. This is from Vary Hall at York University. I hopped on a lot of anti-Israel activities. Again, this is an area. Campus I visit more frequent than any other. And this is not any day, but this is quite frequent in your anti-Israel protests. You had to want a couple weeks to go. Certainly about a year and a half to go very common as well. So you have to identify what is the problem. Not just on campuses, but off campus as well. Is the problem that anti-Israel opponents are forceful and they're full-throated and they're waving their flags and they're threatening Jews and they're intimidating Jews. Is this a problem? Of course it is a problem. Is this the biggest problem? I'm not sure I'd agree with that, but there is a problem here. So the question is we'll have to first, if we wanna identify how we're gonna be able to successfully be Israel advocates as individual people who have jobs and families and mortgages and other commitments in life, we have to identify where are we not doing well and therefore how are we gonna actually fix that? Does that make sense to everybody? So first we have to say, okay, what are opponents doing so well? Are they being successful by running around waving flags? No, they're not. There's actually two reasons they do that. One is to intimidate Jewish and pro-Israel, not just students, but in general as well. We have two students actually from Calgary who last about a year and a half ago were beaten up and assaulted during an anti-Israel, I would almost call it pogrom in Calgary of all places. And again, the whole idea of when our opponents are running around with these flags and they have these big sort of groups, the idea is not so much to convince your average passerby, oh, I see the merits of the Palestinian cause. What the aim is to do is to isolate and intimidate the pro-Israel voices. And the other component of it as well is sort of having the die-ins, if you're familiar with die-ins, is that basically painting themselves with fake blood and lying on the ground or the apartheid walls or security checkpoints and waving flags, not just aimed at intimidating pro-Israel community members or students. It's also aimed at isolating us and making it seem like a bit of a fringe conflict as well. We'll talk a little bit about how they've been successful there. So is this the problem? I think we all agree this is clearly a problem, our opponents are intimidating us, but is this the only problem? Is this how they've been able to successfully build an anti-Israel narrative? It's not the only reason. If you can read this, this says, from Palestine to Ferguson and racism now. Is anybody familiar with Ferguson? Ferguson of course, Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown, 17-year-old, was shot by police? Again, that's a discussion for an entirely different subject. But look what our opponents have done here. From Palestine to Ferguson and racism now, what they've been able to do is hijack co-opt. I mean co-opt isn't even as strong enough word. They've hijacked somebody else's cause, Ferguson, and they've made it their own. We're suffering from racism. Again, you'll see racism, excessive force, colonization, colonialism, et cetera, et cetera. So what they've been able to do is take these other people's causes and make it their own. And it hasn't just been with black student unions and Ferguson, it's been with LGBTQ groups, gay rights groups, it's been with women's rights groups, it's been with labor unionist groups, progressive groups. So this is a very common theme that's been happening for 40 years. So the question is, is this the problem? We would call this coalition building or building relationships with different groups. Again, this is on campus and off campus. This isn't just on university campuses. This is across the realm as well. So the question is, is this the problem? So what's the problem? How have our opponents been so successful at building an anti-Israel narrative? Is it by running around with flags? Not so much. They've been successful at intimidating a lot of pro-Israel voices by doing this, but that hasn't really won a lot of converts to the anti-Israel cause per se. What about this? Again, has it been by building coalitions with groups who by all means should not be anti-Israel? Absolutely, this has been a key component of it. While we've been sort of very insular as a Jewish community for 45 years, our opponents have built relationships with a lot of, how would we call it, marginalized groups. Black unions or at least, you know, black organizations, Aboriginal groups, women's rights groups, refugee groups, et cetera. And unfortunately we're losing a lot of these voices where 50 years ago these are the same people who are coming to Israel living on kibbutzes because Israel was the David and the David and Goliath equation where today Israel's seen as a Goliath and what we've done is we're losing hold of these coalitions. And it's to our opponent's credit. This is a problem. Jews say Israel stopped killing civilians now, another Jew against the massacre in Gaza. Now, what you may know is that many of the leaders of the anti-Israel movements on university campuses and off university campuses are Jews. So this is a real problem as well because what happens is many Jewish students in high school and the elementary school, they grow up particularly in Jewish schools, they grow up often thinking that Israel is this incredible modern miracle, et cetera, and sometimes they graduate, they go off to university or they go off to the workplace and they see that Israel has warped. Israel isn't perfect and of course we all know that. But what the problem is sometimes they can't quite synthesize what they've learned in their family or their synagogues or schools, et cetera, with what they see. And so this is an area where we're losing a lot of people as well. And so here's a key component of where we're not doing well because what we're not doing is we've tended to have a very narrow focus of what defines pro-Israel and what that happens is that we've lost a lot of people who potentially these people couldn't reach but they haven't been. So what is the problem? Is it that our opponents are being loud and forceful and violent? That's a problem, of course. Is it that our opponents are building coalitions and relationships with influential and growing non-Jewish groups? Well, if you will, inside the shtetl. Is that a problem? Absolutely it is. And is the problem that we're not maintaining hold on our own Jewish and natural pro-Israel partners because we haven't been able to build relationships with them from day one? That's a big problem as well. So I use this to illustrate that this is not a sort of a binary black and white issue that in fact there's a multifaceted way that we need to approach this. But the idea is that the way our opponents have been successful is not one or two things and so too we have to be more nuanced in how we think we're gonna win this war as well. So question, both in Canada and the U.S. called I think in 2012, so it's around the 2013, so it's a couple of years outdated but it hasn't changed that much. Question was, is Israel one of the good guys? Above 60 years of age, five sixths of respondents, 83% said yes, and among 18 to 29 it was 57%. That is a 26% drop, a precipitous drop, right? So it goes from five sixths to about just over half. So what's caused this change? We have this huge drop, again over 60 years of age, these are the people who were volunteering on Kibbutzim in the 1960s and 70s. These are the people who, they remember Israel, overcoming these incredible odds, perhaps not in 1948 but maybe 1967, 1973, and yet younger people, their perceptions of Israel are, again, colored by the picture we saw earlier where Israel was killing innocent Arabs, et cetera, et cetera. The entire image is changing, so how do we reverse this? Here's another question, and here's what is very interesting. Who do you support in this current conflict? Again, the same poll. Among the general population, 36% say they support Israel. Among 18 to 29 year olds, it's shrunk by a full third to 24%, but here's the interesting thing. Question was, do you support the Palestinians? It goes from seven to 8%, almost a negligible difference. Now, of course, once you jump here, neither jumps as well. But where's the biggest change? It's not among people who say they now support the Palestinians. It's among people who say they don't support Israel. So this gives us a bit of an insight into what our opponents have been successfully doing. Our opponent's goals and make no mistake about it is that their goal is not to build up the Palestinian cause, it is to destroy the pro-Israel or Zionist cause. Now, I see a lot of people shaking their heads. We know this. I mean, for example, the Soda Stream example is probably the best example. BDS is an excellent example of that. Again, very prominent on campuses, but what happened with BDS? Soda Stream had a, you know, the beverage maker, had a plant in Malaya, a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, if you will, and BDS pressured, they moved away. 500 Palestinians lost their jobs, about 3,000 people as a result. So the issue here is that we see, you know, what our opponents are doing is that, ultimately, they're hurting their own cause, but that's not their goal. Their goal is to hurt Israel's image because the whole idea is, again, when we look back here and we see that we're already seeing a precipitous drop in people who are seeing Israel as one of the good guys, our opponents don't need to build up their cause because what they're doing is they're building relationships with these different influential groups, and we are, again, inside the shtetl, and what we're doing is we're not effectively reaching out to them, so what they're doing is they're chipping away at our base, a full third. Now, can you imagine what perhaps that may be in another 10 or 20 years? It might be 10%, it might be in single digits. So I say that not to depress you, not to scare you, I say that to do, for two reasons. One, to empower you, because one, we can identify what the problem is, and two, we can exactly zero in on how our opponents are doing this. They are not so much, and again, it's much easier for me simply to badmouth someone else because literally anything I can say, I can make up the grandest, and as you know, the wildest claims in the world, and just whatever sticks is gonna be helpful, but the idea is that they don't have to help, they don't have to make their own cause built up, and so this is the approach that they've been taking. So, how have they been successful doing it? Now that I've thoroughly depressed everybody, we know that our opponents are successful at building these narratives, so how have they been able to do that? And again, I use that term narrative very purposefully. When I say narrative, here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that there is a subjective truth. I am not saying that. I'm saying there is an objective truth to the reality on the ground. When I say narrative, I say what our opponents are doing, and they are making this cause one of personal stories. A little bit about me. I grew up in Toronto. I went to the University of Ottawa. I studied journalism. Again, I was a president of the Israel Awareness Committee. I worked on Parliament Hill, moved back to Toronto. I worked in business for about three years, and I moved back to Ottawa. I worked for the Israeli embassy. It was a speechwriter, director of communications. So I was sort of directly involved in this sort of, you know, battle of wording and verbiage and nomenclature, et cetera. And anyway, I went back to Toronto, worked in digital marketing for a few years in there, and just started six months ago with Hasbroah. So the idea is that what I'll say about the approach that the Israeli government took, and again, Hasbroah was initially started by the Israeli government in 2001. What the idea was is that literally those personal stories are the only way that we're going to win this war. So, anybody know what this is? This is a security barrier. The apartheid wall, as our opponents call it. This is probably one of the best images. We saw it earlier in the cartoon by Carlos Latufe, right? The little child, the helicopter gunship, holding the bear, right? The security barrier around him. This is a very personal story. Now, if you see this as a headline, I believe this is from Ebony Magazine, actually, one of the largest-read online magazines for African-Americans in the United States. The Palestinians report increased racism and violence as Gaza offensive continues. As a Palestinian death toll exceeds 1,000, many wonder if the attacks on the West Bank will ever end. Now, this was a year and a half ago during Operation Protective Edge. Now, there's something very interesting to note here. What is the headline? We have the lead, and we had the headline, and then the subhead. The headline is Palestinians report increased racism and violence, and the subhead is the actual factoid. Now, again, this is not a whole discussion on media critique. We have a whole different discussion on that, but what's so interesting here is that what are they leading with? They're leading not with the facts, they're leading with the personal narratives, and what there is no reason they shouldn't be doing that, because the idea is that we as human beings are not simply intellectual beings, we are emotional beings, and our opponents have been able to very successfully zero in on that. So when they tell personal stories about how they've endured racism and violence, again, the media and, you know, what we call stakeholders, your average person will lap it up, because these are the kind of ideas that they've already been fed on. Meanwhile, we just haven't told that same story in the same compelling way. The three main arguments that our opponents make, and I want to address this earlier on, so we can feed this into everything. Racism, occupation, excessive force, nearly everything that our opponents say will fall into one of these three things. So we'll see that again. Here are the facts. Has anybody here not been to Israel before? Okay. Everybody, does everybody here know that Israel is only 15 kilometers wide at its narrowest? Everybody knows that, okay. Now, if you go out onto the street and you ask an average person there, nobody knows that, correct? Now, what if you showed this picture here to the average person walking down Bathurst Street? You said, did you know that Israel is only 15 kilometers wide? If Israel gave up the West Bank, Israel's width would be from Steels to St. Clair. You know what the average person would do? They wouldn't care. Why? Because it means nothing to them. In the same way that if somebody came up to me on the street and accosted me and said, did you know that the Arctic is losing 200 square kilometers every single year? Well, I don't know what 200 square kilometers. That's meaningless to me. Someone said, did you know that 300,000 Syrians have been killed in the last four and a half years in the Civil War? Well, how much is that? I don't know what that means. The idea is that these facts will not win the argument. I'm gonna say that again. These facts will not win the argument. These are true. These are 100% true. But it's simply not going to win the argument. Now, before somebody says, well, hold on, are we talking about, are we simply talking about fluffy stories and it's never gonna get beyond that? No, don't get me wrong. Let me give you an example. Missionaries in the 19th century when they went down to Central America. We're not talking the 15th century when they slaughtered the natives. I'm talking the 19th century. When they went down to Central America, South America, what did they do? Did they show up with a Bible in hand and start preaching the second they show up like the guy young and done that square every day? That's not what they did. Because you know what's standing in a street corner? Are they gonna win any converts? No, what did the missionaries do? 19th, 18th century in Central America? They came in and they built roads. They built hospitals. They built schools. They were nurses and doctors. Don't get me wrong. They preached the gospel eventually. Eventually they talked about the facts, but they didn't lead that way. And the problem that Israel advocates have been making is that we lead with the facts. If I asked you in 60 seconds prove, if I were an average person who was a neutral person, what we call the 70% in the middle. And I ask you, I heard Israel's in apartheid state, is it? And I knew of 60 seconds. What many of us would do is to say, Israel's not in apartheid state. It has Arab members of parliament. It has Arab television personalities, et cetera. Your average person, that doesn't mean anything. Meanwhile, what's gonna be, if you asked our opponent, give me 60 seconds, show me that Israel's in apartheid state. You know what they would do? They would tell a story how they were beaten up by the IDF in the West Bank. They would tell a story how their grandfather was kicked out of his home in Jerusalem. They would tell all these stories, perhaps fanciful, almost certainly exaggerated, and embellished, but the idea is that, which one is your average person going to hear? Is your average person going to hear, well, you know, you have to understand that there's a complex geopolitical reality. Or are they gonna hear, the Zionists kick me out of my home. Pardon the poor Arabic accent. You know they're gonna favor the latter, right? And so unfortunately, this is just not the way to win. This is what we've been doing. This is a reality. This is where we go on Hasbara fellowships. What we do is every year, we take the top pro-Israel student activist to Israel for 16 days of intensive training. This is one of the places we went. This is a picture from Rantis, an Arab village in the West Bank. Does anybody know what this is here? That's the Mediterranean Sea. You are looking over the entire expanse of Israel. That's Tel Aviv, and you know what this is here? That's Ben-Gurion Airport. That is literally the expanse of the whole country. Now, if I were obviously a picture, you know, it can only tell so much. It's still, you know, a flat surface. But if I were to show you one of two things, if I were to tell you Israel's 15 kilometers wide, and you know, et cetera, et cetera, or if I were to tell you, show you this and explain when I was here, I saw this. I literally, when we went to a place, and I'll show you this picture. This is us this past summer, a group of students. This is a place called Al-Faymanasha. Has anybody ever heard of Al-Faymanasha? I'm not surprised. I've literally never heard, not a presentation where somebody's ever heard of Al-Faymanasha. Little Jewish community in the West Bank. From here, you can literally see 70% of Israel's Jewish population. Now, not everyone is going to go here. Not everyone is gonna be able to be here. But when we articulate these stories, whatever stories they are, someone were to ask me, Israel's small, I could give them the facts, I could talk about this. Or I could say, when I was there, I was stood at a mountain top or a hilltop in this place called Al-Faymanasha, and I looked left to right and I could see from one side of the country to the other. I literally could see nearly the entire country. I could see the airplane, I could see the entire width, just like that. Now, which one is gonna have more effect? We know which one is gonna have a greater effect. But the idea is that we need to play this more. Does anybody know what this picture is? Anybody recognize, not this particular picture, but this kind of picture. Anybody see this? So this is a gentleman, he's in the West Bank. He's just outside of Bethlehem. He's holding a paper that's a certificate of registration and he's holding a key. Does anybody know what that key is? He is claiming that that key belonged to him before the Zionists kicked him out in 1948. Wow, absolutely. Wow, this is part of their narrative. They, ladies and gentlemen, they have made it show and tell. We are giving doctoral dissertations and they are doing show and tell. Now, for a professor of modern Israel studies, yes, what we're doing is gonna work. But, ladies and gentlemen, for the 90% of people, and people aren't stupid, they're not lazy, but you know what, they have jobs and families and mortgages and they have interest and they have soccer practice. They don't have the bandwidth, intellectual or emotional, to comprehend and really address everything that we're asking them to do. So what our opponents, rather, are doing is spoofing them and saying, here's a key, the Jews kicked me out. Wow, that's a compelling story. And it's not just one person. This is part of their whole narrative now. This is in Ramallah. This is a giant novelty key over the town or mosque throughout the West Bank. They have made this part of their national story, the key. When they hold this key up, they say, this represents the Jews kicking me out. Again, just to reiterate at the risk of beating a dead horse, we've given these facts and they've held the key. So how have we been able to address this, ladies and gentlemen, we're Jews, we're smart, we know what we're doing. How have we been able to appeal to people's emotions? Well, I'll tell you how, through infographics. Now, ladies and gentlemen, don't be ashamed. Has anybody, actually, you don't have to put your hands up, has anybody seen this from last year? I saw it. Has anybody, if you're on social media, has anybody shared this on their Facebook page last year? I have. This is something that the IDF puts out. Israel uses weapons to protect its civilians. Hamas uses civilians to protect its weapons. Is that false? Absolutely not, it's 100% true. But you know what, ladies and gentlemen? Does this play to my emotion? Does this make me scared, or happy, or vulnerable, or sympathetic? No, no, no, no. This one, Pillar of Defense, 2,248 rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel in 2012. Again, these things are true, but the problem is that it works for us. For those people who are already pro-Israel or in that pro-Israel camp, we see this, we share this, we send to our friends. How many times did I see this on Facebook or Twitter last year? So many. How many times was this emailed to me last year? So many. But the problem is that if we are already on site, this is very compelling, but for your average person, we need a hope. Again, this are the facts. This is, per se, the gospel, the information we're trying to sell. But how do we do it? What our opponents do, again, they have that key and they never really get beyond that. So what they've been able to do, they've sold falsehood with success, and we have not been able to sell truth. When I previously worked for the Israeli government or the Israeli embassy, I frequently to have diffs agreements with my superiors. And I remember that my superiors were very opposed to the idea of making it a personal, compelling case. And why? Because they said, listen, our opponents are showing pictures of dead babies, which they are. Our opponents are doing something called Pallywood. Is anybody here not familiar with Pallywood? Pallywood is basically making an entire sort of industry of showing suffering. For example, they show a whole funeral procession, and then it turns out the guy falls out of his coffin. So he gets back in and he jumps back in the coffin and so on. These are the kind, a whole choreographed rock throwing incident. The whole idea they've made it just so over the top as to be ridiculous and showing pictures of dead babies. And so what we've tended to do is move the complete opposite way. And this is some of the challenge that I remember in my time, speaking to my superiors, and they said they're showing pictures of dead babies. We're not gonna show pictures of dead babies, but the problem is there's a huge extreme between showing pictures of dead babies and showing exclusively infographics. There's a way to make it compelling that we haven't done. So how do we do that? So so far we've established the following. We've established that a lot of things our opponents have been doing successfully. Some of it has been aimed specifically at building their reach, but more specifically it's been aimed at hurting Israel's cause. So have they been able to do that primarily through telling personal stories, making it very compelling in that sense. So how do we tell personal stories? What's a personal story and how do we craft one? So ask yourself what matters most to your audience? For example, let's say I'm a car salesman. Let's say I'm a car salesman and I'm trying to sell a car. And you come in, you try, and I wanna sell you a car. Now there are two ways I can sell a car. One is to say, well, look at you, you're a tall guy, you should have this car, very high van, going in this whole pitch and vomiting all this information like this, just broadcasting everything at you. And within 60 seconds, you're probably out the door. That's one option. The other option is to say, not just schmooze a little bit, hi, how you doing, what's your name, what do you do, family, of course I need to do that. Then I need to ask you questions. Consultative sales process, as we say in business, consulting, asking you questions. What do you use your car for? How often do you drive? Soccer practice, do you like to drive four by four, what's your budget? Mileage, environment, what concerns you? You say, well, Rob, I really need good mileage. I do a lot of driving, I live in Toronto, I work in Brampton, I need good mileage for my car. Well, yeah, I got three kids, soccer practice, so I need something big as well. So when you tell me what you need, then I'll say, ah, then I can craft that for you. So what happened is that instead of me vomiting or broadcasting this information to you, what you've done is you've told me how I'm gonna sell it to you. You've told me, well, Rob, I want A, B, and C. So then what can I can do? I craft whatever I have to sell to you. So that's what we do. For example, somebody was recently telling me his sister, Jewish, lives just outside Ottawa on a farm. And recently she found, whatever long story short she, there were some concerning, suspicious things happening next door at a farm, some things that look like a bit of a training ground, et cetera. It's a little bit concerning. They called the RNCP, they're looking into it. Probably nothing. But this person was telling me, he said, why sister's Jewish? And she wasn't so concerned about this. He said, why isn't she so concerned about this? The whole idea was that for her, fighting and caring about Israel, even as a Jew, particularly as a Jew, was not going to be framed successfully in the lens of Islamic extremism. For example, this person, she was a real environmentalist, you know, what this fellow was telling me. She's a real environmentalist. So telling her that she should support Israel because of the march of Islamic extremism is not gonna do it. For example, me, I do not care too hoots about nanotechnology or drip irrigation. I don't care about Israel's technology and I certainly don't care about Israel's environment. That's just my personality. I don't care. So if I was undecided about Israel and you tried to sell me an Israel, said, well, you know, Israel has made the desert bloom, et cetera, et cetera. That's very nice, but I don't care. In the same way, what we are doing is we are taking the stories that are important to us and impactful to us and we are trying to put that on someone else instead of using the consultative process and asking them, what's important to you? Like this lady in Ottawa. She cares about environment, so she's not going to care about Israel if we try to scare her by talking about Muslim extremism. Does that make sense to everybody? So if we know that she cares about environmentalism, we are going to make her care about Israel using environmentalism. If we know somebody cares about the plight of refugees, that's how we are going to make somebody care about Israel. If we know somebody cares about Israel or in general cares about technology or that's an interest, that's how we're going to sell them on Israel. Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot simply be in the approach where we are broadcasting information. We have to move to the approach where we are in a consultative process. We are asked, what is important to you? So how do we do that? How do we build these kinds of stories? In a nutshell, again, we could do an entire session we certainly have on how to build a compelling story, how to use this key storytelling principles and make them effective. But in a brief nutshell, I would suggest as your homework the following. Go home, not necessarily right now, when you're walking in the shower, driving to work, whatever it is, think of five stories, five personal stories from Israel when you were there or it could be from a story that you've heard and in those five different areas, which one could be compelling? So make one about environmentalism that you saw, something you felt or experienced, et cetera. Let me give you an example of a story. So this past summer, when we brought a group of students to Israel for training, we met Raquel Frankel. Does anybody know who Raquel Frankel? Her son was one of the three boys kidnapped and murdered last summer. It would be hard to exaggerate how incredible this woman is and how inspiring this woman is. But if I was gonna build a story, in other words, I, thank God, did not experience what she experienced. One could not imagine. And yet, what I can do is, I can take her story that she shared with me and again, we don't, in the interest of time, I obviously can't do that now. Her personal story, you know what happened in the news, but she shared her story and she shared what happened how the Jewish people and pros in her world came together. We can use that story and I can use that story to talk about the unity, to talk about brotherhood. I can use a story that did not even happen to me and I can use that as one of the most compelling stories imaginable. Does that make sense? I didn't even have to experience it. It's incredible. A couple weeks ago, we had an Israeli soldier come in and an Adler's star up beneath the helmet. We brought him to nine different campuses. We also did a community event. And somebody said to me, he said, you know, this is a very powerful story, what this guy is saying. And yet, how do I share his story? I wasn't where he was. I didn't face combat in Gaza. How do I share it? So the way we are able to take these people's stories and make them their own, not by exaggerating or embalishing or making up, what it's by saying is, so for example, this guy is 23 years old, this soldier. When he experienced this, he was 21. So somebody might say, wow, I saw beneath the helmet, it was an incredible story. And you know, I have a 21 year old. I can't imagine. When my 21 year old goes off and he's an hour late, I freak out. I can't imagine my son doing that. Or I remember being 21 years old and I certainly wasn't mature enough to do that, so we've been able to basically take a story that literally did not even happen to us and we've been able to turn it into a compelling example. So again, I would say as a homework, think of a few different stories that either were impactful for you and memorable for you in different areas. So one in perhaps, you know, in environment and technology and diversity, et cetera, and think and then have these stories ready made. Another problem that our opponents, or we haven't been doing, is that our opponents are taking a strategic approach when we have been taking a tactical approach. What's the difference? Strategic means, what's the big picture? Tactical is how we're gonna do it. What our opponents have been very good at doing, they've been doing things that look very grassroots. I'll give you BDS as a perfect example, Boycott Divestment Session. It looks extremely grassroots. It looks like the natural outgrowth of students and the general population who just can't stand Israel occupying Palestinian land. Reality started in 2004 by Omar Bargoudi in Ramallah and the BDS resolutions are almost exactly word for word. They just copy and paste the name of the university. That's literally the same thing. But what they've done is they take something and they extremely calculated, but it looks organic and it looks real. What we've been doing is we've been doing things very half arsed, very inorganic, but it looks very calculated. So it looks stiff, it looks planned and yet we haven't even been reaching out. So again, strategic versus tactical, our opponents have been setting goals, we haven't been setting goals and they've been measuring results and branding very effectively. There's a good example from Dilbert, pointy-haired boss says, how are you doing on your unspoken objectives? My what? I'm referring to the goals that I have in mind that I've never mentioned, how are those going? I'm totally nailing them, right? If we don't know what we're aiming to do, if we're talking to a friend, right? And again, this is something that we have to be calculated about. If I'm trying to reach a friend at work, at the water cooler, I have to be strategic in what I'm saying. If I'm on Facebook, I have to be strategic about what I'm posting, right? I can't on one day post pro-Israel things and the next day post something that's, let's say, anti-this or anti-this because you know what? If I'm trying to reach this progressive friend and I'm posting things, let's say, about Justin Trudeau, it's very hard because you know what, he's gonna see that but he's also gonna see this. So we have to think and again, a whole different social media discussion but the whole idea is we have to be strategic. We can't just tell facts. We also can't just tell stories. We have to be strategic, when I say strategic, we have to know what we're aiming to achieve with them. Who are we, I'm sure you all know five people that you see on a regular, semi-regular basis who you can reach. Identify them, think about them. Spend five minutes thinking about what matters. You've talked to these people. What concerns them? What gets them ticked? That's how you're gonna get them to care about Israel. Now, what's the good news if there's any good news? This is a bit of an online expose so those of you who are on Facebook or social media. So this is research from Khalid Laktan, an Israeli researcher. What he found last year, so under a United Nations Relief Works Agency, if those of you who aren't familiar, it's the United Nations Agency responsible for Palestinian sort of civil affairs, if you will, five billion dollar budget, okay? Now, what he did was this researcher, he took these terms, he took tweets, so mentioned on Twitter of these different terms, on right, different spelling. And what he found was two things. Green clusters were anti-Israel, in other words people who were saying on right in an anti-Israel context and blue is in a pro-Israel context. What have we noticed? These people aren't talking to each other. So when we're on Facebook or on Twitter or we're on sending in emails, what are we doing? We're not talking to, and we're not talking to the 70% of people in the middle. We're just talking to ourselves. Now there's value in talking to ourselves because we need to keep ourselves educated, we need to keep ourselves motivated and confident, but we're not letting, we're not telling anybody else, we're just talking to ourselves. So how do we reach the 70% of people when we have this amazing fact and I send it out to my buddy and my friends and so on. And she said, that's very good, very nice, but what about the 70% of people walking down Young Street, they're not hearing it. We're talking to ourselves, right? We barely talk to each other, we barely talk to anybody else, right? And again, you can see this idea as well, that we're to the pro-Israel, we get it from Jerusalem Post, times of Israel, Haaretz, we're talking to ourselves. We're not talking to the people who are gonna be influencing others. It was an election four days ago, 338 MPs were elected. I guarantee you, we haven't worked on Parliament Hill and for the Israeli Embassy and on campus, I guarantee you, every single one of those people who was elected was involved as far as in university, involved in campus government, campus media, student club, and beyond. When we're reaching people and they graduate and they may have families and mortgages and jobs, et cetera, but these people become voters, they become donors, they become letter writers to MPs and to newspapers and so on. The whole idea is that we're not reaching them, we're talking to ourselves. And again, they get their research from the same place as well. Neither of us are very good at this. So what does it mean? If you're on social media, build it, get new people. I asked a student once, I said to them, you know, there's a non-jewish student in your class, did you add them on Facebook? No, why not? Add them, get to know them, take them out for coffee, ask them about their parents. It can look like a date, it doesn't matter, get to know them. Because you know darn well, our opponents are doing that. They've been doing it for 45 years while we've been having full awful days in the whole house and we've been in the stable. Sounds very harsh, I'm sorry, but that's just the reality of sort of as a Jewish community, as a pro-Israel movement, we have to talk to people we ordinarily wouldn't as well. So I wanna leave this thought as well with you, we're not ending quite yet, but leave this with, so who's your target? Not asking you to go join an association downtown or go to a part of town which freaks you out and start preaching the good news about Israel. That's not gonna happen. That's not the effective way of a student. A student asked me once, she said, so I'm just supposed to talk to the, you know, this Chinese guy beside me in class, talked about Israel. I said no, because you know what? He doesn't care. He doesn't care about Israel, our opponents, again, there are two things they've been doing by running around waving flags. One is make sure that we can't get to these people anymore if they're making a lot harder. Well, not we can't get to them, it makes it harder. And two, it's intimidating us. We have to be strategic and we have to build these relationships. Or again, we're talking about getting back to the missionaries in 1900s and you know, in Mexico and China. They didn't just run in and kill people. I mean, that worked 500 years ago, but what did they do? They built bridges and hospitals and schools, et cetera. That's how they build those relationships. And then of course, eventually they have something to sell. But they don't come in guns of blazing because people are gonna run away like the example of car dealership, running away. So we have to think, where are my efforts best spent? Well, who are the people who I can most realistically reach? I'm probably not gonna reach the guy who has a flag on his backpack that says free Palestine now. I'm probably not going to best reach a colleague or a family member who thinks Israel actually murders Palestinian beings. I'm not gonna reach them, probably. I don't want to be defeatist and say no, but I'm gonna say, what about the 70% in the middle? This is where again, we've making this mistake about focusing too much on ourselves, talking to ourselves, you know, in the example I showed earlier, or too much on our opponents, getting into that sort of yelling match. We need to get out of that as well. We need to think about, these sort of rallies where people are on one side of the street and the other side of the, we need to think about how are we gonna get to the 70% in the middle, right? So we have to think, who are the five individuals I know who are in the middle who I can reach? Not the people who hate Israel, not the people who love Israel, who are five people that I know, influential people. Again, we'll talk about that in a second. People who are influential, who I can reach about Israel, right? Progressive people. This is where we're losing the war. We're losing the war among women's rights groups and gay rights groups and so on. We need to be, and again, it's a big problem as well, how we as a Jewish community and pro-Israel community have been unfortunately sort of tied ourselves very closely with, and you see this in the US, with conservative cause as far as making Israel, if you will, a partisan issue. This is what we've seen in the United States and hopefully not so much in Canada, although I, you know, time and time we'll see, but the whole idea is that, the more we make Israel into a niche issue, the more other people who politically disagree, they're not pro-Israel anymore. Because you know what, we've made pro-Israel, we've told them pro-Israel, that's not it. We're not talking about anti-Israel, you know, fringe people. We're talking to your average person who says, you know what, I disagree on this economic issue. Well, you're voting for this person, we have to be open-minded about that. We have to target people who are progressive, people who are a little bit more politically, we may or may not agree with, but we have to understand that, you know what, this has a wide appeal, particularly among younger people, and they have to be influential and accessible. I've talked to the students as well, I say, you wanna reach out to groups which are influential. You might be a guy who talks to you in class and he's the president of the Plumbing Association, him and his brother, Jim Bob. Oh, and they'll meet you anytime and they'll talk to you about Israel anytime, but with apologies to Jim Bob, who cares? Because you know what, Jim Bob's just Jim Bob. We wanna reach the people who are gonna be the MPs of tomorrow and the judges of tomorrow and the letter writers of tomorrow and the donors, the influence and the opinion makers of tomorrow. That's what we wanna reach. With apologies to these guys, these are not our target audience here, right? They apologize, you know, there's sort of two portly middle-aged Trekkies here. Apologize to any Trekkies in the audience, mean no offense by it, but the idea is we have to say, who are we trying to go after? We wanna get people and I tell the students as well, people who are cool, people who are influential. This is what our opponents have been doing as well. Again, we don't just, same way, you know, for example, if you're networking, you're at a big function, I hate networking. I don't enjoy it at all, but if you're at a big networking event, is it the guy in the corner shoving food in his face? Is that the most influential, is that, he doesn't wanna talk to you, maybe that's not who you wanna talk to. You wanna talk to me with a guy who's a circle, et cetera, the idea is that we wanna talk to the people, because if we're talking to those five people, we're not talking necessarily, you know, Granny who, you know, man, maybe could be convinced I'm in Israel. Again, God love Granny, I hope she's well. We wanna think about five people who are influential, that if we get to them, we're gonna get to their circle, right? We wanna win influential converts. We don't just win a convert who won't win other converts. Does that make sense to people? We have to, when we're talking about thinking strategically, we have to do it in a way that we think is gonna build out that call. So who's the target on it? And then as I mentioned, customize the message, customize the argument. Now, this picture, queers against Israel apartheid. I'm gonna ask you a question. Is, on what planet does this make sense? Does anybody think that this makes sense on any planet? At all. This is one of the most insane things that anybody could have imagined. Queers against Israel apartheid. Insane, right? It's a big lie, it's insane. Now people say to me, Rob, how are we ever gonna reach Indian population and Chinese population? And populations, what do they care about Israel? Progressive people, what do they care about Israel? They have nothing to do with it. They don't wanna hear about us. Ladies and gentlemen, if our opponents can do this, if they can build a relationship and a solid one at that with a group, and there even can be a group called queers against Israel apartheid, and pardon my French, but damn well we can do it too. Absolutely, if they can do this, absolutely we can do it. So what are the four best practices to use in your conversations? You need to elevate Israel. Don't make it zero sum, make it personal, and get people hopeful, get into that as well. So what is elevate Israel? Why support Israel? Right? Tell people why. Blaming Palestinians doesn't mean people will support Israel in the same way. Remember that statistic we saw earlier? What our opponents are doing, they're blaming Israel, but you know what, the Palestinian numbers aren't going up, right? In other words, they're winning, they're not winning converts to their own side as they are taking converts away from us, right? So what we need to do, we know that that's not gonna work. So what we need to do is, we need to elevate Israel. It's not going to be effective. We may think it's true, and we may know it's true, and we may feel it, but unfortunately speaking ill of them is just not a winning strategy. We have to say why Israel matters, not why they are bad. It's just not a key to success. And again, contrast Israel when there are, when there is something to blame, but it's not per se about blaming them, and again, zero sum means don't make people choose, because I tell you, nobody wants to choose. We are politically correct. We are open-minded. We know we don't have all the facts. If somebody came up to me and said, what do you think about the recent election in Belarus? Well, I'm just bragging, because I happened to read about it. I happened to saw a headline about it. That's about it. I don't know anything about the election in Belarus. I don't know, there's a dictator there. But if somebody asked me, what do you think about this? Choose the side. Is whatever the president's name, is he a dictator, is he not a dictator, or this and that? Don't make me choose. We don't like to choose. So ladies and gentlemen, when we are forcing people to choose, you have to choose Israel or Palestinians, Israel or Arab. We want people to choose. I want people to choose, but that's just not what people want. And so instead of trying to force something down their throat, we have to do is we have to work around them. Because we know asking them to choose, them, us or them, most people are gonna say, I don't wanna choose anybody, right? Does anybody, we all agree that this is what we see in the government. Equal handed, even handed. I mean, obviously even handed is silly. I mean, there's no comparison. I know there's a couple of questions. We'll try to take them at the end, just all at once, but yeah, I mean, the whole idea is that people don't wanna choose. And so when we force people to choose, they're still not going to, right? What they're gonna do is take a step back and they're gonna say, you know what? Apox on both your houses. You know, let them all kill each other, let God sort them out. We're not gonna win that way. What we have to do is elevate Israel. People don't see it as black and white, right? We gain credibility when we acknowledge the other side. There's nothing wrong with saying that Palestinians are suffering too. Now, how we turn that into saying, well, whose fault is it, right? Gaza is absolutely an open air prison. Absolutely. But who's the warden? It's Hamas is the warden. Oh yeah, for sure. It, Gaza is an open air prison. Absolutely, I agree with that. The Palestinians in Gaza are suffering. There's no doubt about it. But who's to blame for that? So you see what I did there? I am not saying that your average person who's living in Gaza is living in a shangry law. Listen, we've all seen these pictures of some of these shopping malls there, but we know your average person in Gaza is not doing well. But it's not Israel's fault. It's the Palestinian Authority's fault and it's Hamas' fault. It's Islamic extremism's fault. So you see what I did there? I have one shown empathy for their side, which is a winner. Everybody needs to hear that. And the second part is that I've then turned it around and said, you know what, and there to blame for it. So I'm not asking people to choose anymore. Because hey, your average person, everybody wants peace. We only just need Hamas to go away, or whatever the is. So we've been able to shift the argument. This is just an example from Facebook. Student was saying, my heart is broken, right, et cetera, et cetera. So they've been able to make it very compassionate. Some examples as well showing empathy, compassion, why is this happening because of Hamas, et cetera? Every victim matters. No, again, this isn't just a talking for it. This is people know this. We know this is true, right? We see, I mean, whose heart isn't broken when they see an eight month old, you know, killed in a Palestinian hospital. Now, you and I know why they were killed. You and I know the Israeli government didn't target them. They were killed because Hamas put them there. It's still crushing, it's terrible. All the more reason people need to hear that, right? We talked about making it personal, telling stories, telling values. Facts are important, but emotions will impact people. If I tell you a fact, you're gonna forget it in an hour, tomorrow and certainly in a month. If I tell you a compelling story, you're gonna remember the rest of your life, right? We talked about this. Lama Al-Satari, five months old, she was killed in Israeli airstrike in Rafa. I have a one year old daughter, looks very similar to that. Whose heart wouldn't be broken looking at that picture, right? Who wouldn't be? Now, I don't know the story on this girl. She almost certainly was put in a position because Hamas, as we know, fires rockets from residential areas on purpose. We know that. And your average person is gonna read this and they are gonna say this is absolutely terrible and this is just, right? This is an Israeli infographic that the Israeli Defense Forces put out. Which one's gonna win? Which one's gonna win, right? We don't have a shot when we do this. So, there's two stories that come out, there's two ideas that come out of that. One, obviously we talked about personal stories. That's the only way to do it. And two, is that we talk about taking these and making it showing compassion because what we've done is we've neutered them of being able to use these pictures. We don't have to fear these pictures, ladies and gentlemen, because this is not our fault. So, the idea is that one, we need to change this and make this a compelling story. And two, we need to take that. We say, you know what, this has no power because you know what, that is a tragedy. That is a horrific war crime. And who did it, right? Who did it? We know it wasn't Israel. Israel might have pulled the trigger. But we all know gosh darn well, who's actually guilty of that. So, we don't need to fear that. What we do is we need to stop playing by their rules. We need to flip it around and we set the agenda. All right, giving people hope as well. Nobody wants to hear just some pictures of what our students did. Nobody wants to hear about a long, intractable conflict. They wanna hear who is gonna fix it. The average person says, I don't care about what happened 3,000 years ago or 100 years ago, right or wrong. The first question is, how's it gonna be fixed and who's gonna do it? So we need to give people hope. We need to be optimistic, right? And five, and I would say perhaps most importantly, dealing with anti-Israel claims, we have a whole session on that. It's not about who wins the debate but who controls the issues. Let me give an example. Somebody says to me, Israel's an apartheid state. And I say, no it's not. And you say, yes it is. And I say, no it's not. Advice for on and on and on. Now you sitting in the middle here, even if I win the argument because Israel's not an apartheid state. I win the argument. In the middle, what's he gonna think? He's gonna think, well, probably right. We're getting back to that point. Do people like to choose sides? No. So even if I win this argument, what is your average person gonna think? Are they gonna think Israel's not an apartheid state case closed? And they're gonna think, well you know what, I don't know enough about it. I can't make a firm decision. Israel's maybe sort of apartheid. Maybe it's apartheid evenings and weekends after six. You know, if you're on the right place. The idea is that they don't want to, that was a cellphone joke for them. People don't want to choose. So the idea is that we have to set the agenda ourselves. Because even if we win an argument, if they've set the agenda, we are gonna lose. Case closed. There is no reason why we need to be responding to BDF. We, we need to responding to apartheid themes. We should be setting the agenda. So when we see pictures like this, we don't need to fear them. We need to take those pictures and say, here's a picture of a five month old gaza girl who was murdered by Hamas. We don't need to fear it. We need to set the agenda. We're talking about personal relationships. I share this with students as well. 85% of our success, not just in financial and business, is not so much based on technical knowledge and the facts. It's based on our ability to communicate, negotiate, lead, build, cashier, build a relationship, right? If our opponents could do that and with a group called queers against Israel apartheid, it's clearly not because of the facts. So of course we need to lament and say, that's absolutely insane how that happened. But we need to learn from it and say, okay, they were, if they were able to do that, Talmudic language, call it a horror, how much more so can we do it with other groups as well? Absolutely. So this is a very iconic image. Anybody know what this image or does any look familiar to anybody? Exactly. So this is a young boy in the second Intifad in 2002, I think, throwing a stored in an Israeli tank. Now, obviously we know the whole story behind this. I mean, look, this is clearly not a active war zone. We can see these soldiers milling about in the back. This is clearly not an active war zone, yet our opponents have made this image very iconic. What's the picture of Israel that we are selling? I don't know. We are not selling a proactive message. We are selling a reactionary message. They are selling a message that Israel is. What were the three? Racist, occupier, excessive force. There were three. Racism, excessive force, and occupation. They are selling those messages every single day. We are not selling a message. So when we talk about reacting, we cannot win if we are not setting an agenda. So this is when we're talking about the stories that you're building with friends, the things that you're posting on Facebook, the articles that you're writing in your local paper to your MP, think proactively. Think about opportunities about how you're going to brand Israel. Think about how an opportunity where, what was the most impactful thing when you visit Israel to you? And for somebody else, think about what they care about and build it based on that. The whole idea is if I leave you with a couple things, one is taking what you know about Israel and put that aside. Emphasize what you feel about Israel. How you felt when you went somewhere. How you felt when you saw this, what you saw. It doesn't just have to be when you went there. When you met somebody impactful. We talked about Raquel Frankel. If you met somebody like that, somebody Israeli, somebody who represents sort of the best of Israel, take that, tell, and how do you make their story, your story, how you felt, how you would act in that situation, right? And then what you do is go home and think about five people. Five people who are influential. Work, friends, et cetera. Influential people who have a wide social network and think, what do they care about, right? Having talked to them. I mean, we're not talking to somebody you've never talked to. We're talking about somebody you've talked to. What do they care about? They care about environmental. Are they maybe left of center or progressive who maybe cares about social causes? Whatever it is, think about that. Take stories, right? And how we do it. So I go up and I see them at work and I say, hey, Frank, happy Monday. How was the weekend? By the way, I want just, no. We build relationships. We take people out for coffee. We get to know them. We ask about their kids. We ask how their weekend was. We slowly build these things. Eventually, we have a product to sell, right? Eventually, we have a product to sell. But we're only gonna get to that product if we build a relationship for us. In the same way what we've been doing, think of an Advil. An Advil is a sugar coating. Our opponents have basically been selling the world sugar pills. There's nothing to it. But you know what? It tastes sweet and people love it. Now, we've been selling people bucklies. It's terrible, tastes terrible, but it works, right? We know it's true. We know it's true, but God, it's bitter. Who wants bitter, right? People aren't stupid. People aren't lazy, but they're busy. And they don't have the intellectual or emotional capacity to care about every single issue they hear about. So what we need to do is, we need to sugarcoat what we're doing. We need to make it palatable. Because you know what? Again, we're selling the facts too. We're not gonna replicate our opponents and sell a bill of goods and just sell a whole lot of nothing. We're not gonna stoop to that. But what we should do is sell them something very valuable and very true, but we need to sell it in a compelling way. So there's something that we can take from our opponents we can take there, but doesn't mean we have to wholesale sell our morality. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means we have to be better salespeople. So I'll just finish up with this. It's a nice quote. Again, this is similar to what our rabbi said in Peakea vote as well. Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And I wanna say that to you as well. Is that, what is it, Sunday night? A lot of things you could be doing right now. You are here. The fact that you are here literally means you care about this and not just care about this. You are willing to come here and listen to me drawn on and on about this. It means that I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but it is up to you. So sorry, if you feel that 10,000 pounds on your shoulder, I'm here to help share that weight amongst you too, but the whole idea is that this is a lesson. It's not about, you shouldn't walk here frightened and think, oh my gosh, this is terrible. Feel empowered. You have literally the potential to change this. To change the world. And what we tell the students, you have to change the world. And students laugh. And I say, well, the world is changing. Our opponents are changing it. So the world is going to change regardless. The question is, do we wanna change it to what we want? Or are we gonna let them change it? Because it's going to change. It's gonna change. It's like Mordecai told Esther in the Book of Esther. Hey, it's gonna happen either way. The question is, are you gonna be part of it? Are we gonna be part of it? Or are we gonna let the world change to what we want? Or are we gonna let our opponents move? Because it's gonna happen either way. So before I take some questions, I wanna thank you all for coming. How we can continue. If you like what you hear, we do customized training workshops, social media training, best practices, media relations. Obviously no cost to doing this, to doing this session itself. So please talk to me if you wanna do one for five, six people at a home, or a synagogue or what have you. Again, obviously as registered not for profit, we obviously rely on donations as well, which helps us go to do these things for students. And what you saw obviously was this tiny snapshot of what we provide to students every single day. And then of course, if you know a student, for Husbur fellowships, if you know a student, pro-Israel university student in university in Canada, we're also of course in the States as well. Let them know we're doing an incredible 16 day training this coming winter. They come back engaged, motivated, confident, and just ready just to take on the world. So definitely let students know about that as well. So with that, I'm gonna thank you so much for coming and happy to take some questions.