The Israeli government hopes so. They have launched a campaign that seeks to deputize all Israelis as ambassadors. It’s drawn a lot of attention, not all good. One aspect of the campaign is to teach Israelis about accomplishments of their fellow citizens so they can tell foreigners. According to the LA Times:

Many traveling Israelis encounter prejudice among misinformed foreigners and find themselves constantly engaged in arguments and defense while abroad. Now the government is offering its traveling ambassadors tips and talking points. “Together, we can change the picture,” says the website launched by the ministry of diaspora and public diplomacy, inviting people to brush up on their history, geography and current affairs to better convey their point.

Aside from providing hard facts on hard matters, the website also encourages the accidental ambassadors to make note of Israel’s impressive achievements in fields such as agriculture, technology and medicine and to encourage others to visit Israel.  It is, perhaps, a wise government that knows some of its people have shortcomings in the diplomacy department and has a few correctional tips: Listen first, then answer; keep your body-language confident and stable, and don’t move your hands furiously when you talk — it really makes people nervous.

But campaign “Explaining Israel,” meant to show that Israel is on the right side of stuff too, is already rubbing some people the wrong way, including members of the foreign press. Tired of Israel being portrayed as conflict-central and backward? Myth-Busting 101 includes a series of humorous clips that poke fun at ill-informed and stereotypical coverage of Israel. It’s not going down well.

It also seeks to dispel myths, as this YNET article explains:

One such myth: “Israel is a huge country”, and the appropriate response: “Not true. Israel is one of the smallest states in the world. India is 150 times bigger, Germany 16 times, and Italy 13 times. Israelis make up just one thousandth of the world’s population.”

Another example: “Israelis don’t really want peace,” and the suggested rejoinder: “Not true. Despite seven wars and terror that has continued for more than six decades, Israel has made huge concessions for the sake of peace with its neighbors Egypt and Jordan.”

“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”

The geographic pairings include Israel-Palestine (5,788 in the last 24 hours), Albania-Serbia (9,257), India-Pakistan (7,160) and Greece-Turkey (16,368).

The religious parings include Muslim-Jewish (1,361 new friendships in the last 24 hours), Christian-atheist (57,749), Sunni-Shiite (677) and Muslim-Christian (72,935)

Politically, there have been 31,678 new U.S. conservative-liberal pairings made in the last day.

Facebook also lists some of the sample comments:

Daniela Bryan I think we need to find peace within ourselves as human beings before we can attain external peace. We are moving in the right direction and if everyone does their part starting with themselves we will get there.

Rose Rackabones very nice idea but i don’t know how it can effact those who are in heavily conflicted areas like afganistan. Every little thing counts when it comes to trying to make everyone friends, but it’s hardly us, the people who are posting on this who need to push. We already want peace. It’s the powerhungry politicians who start wars and the uneducated poor who need to be taught that violence is not a means of communication.

Charlene Barker I am very supportive of peace, especially HR808 for a Dept of Peace.

Elliot Thomas Rosen Seems like a great idea. Just curious, concerning the “Friendships on Facebook” graphs, has the data been adjusted for the natural increase in Facebook connections? I wonder what non-profit organizations could do if these metrics were made publicly available. Additionally, perhaps there are applications that groups can use to find like-minded people to organize for a common cause.

Ali Ab Peace: Life, Faith, Love.

The Facebook portal is part of a large Peace Dot directory being organized by Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab:

“Many are pessimistic about peace, but our Stanford team sees a different trend. Today many good things are happening. To highlight work that increases peace, we organized “Peace Dot” and invited some partners to join us for the alpha launch in October 2009.

“The Peace Dot idea is simple: Orgs set up a subdomain at http://peace.[DomainName].com. At that page orgs share their work. At Stanford, we gather Peace Dot pages into a directory.”

Some of the other organizations in the Peace Dot directory include:

• peace.bjfogg.com
• peace.care2.com
• peace.castilleja.org
• peace.cityofmanor.org
• peace.couchsurfing.org
• peace.dalailamafoundation.org
• peace.facebook.com
• peace.khanacademy.org
• peace.iftf.org
• peace.imvu.com
• peace.kaisersantarosa.org
• peace.kissmetrics.com
• peace.learning.com
• peace.pbworks.com
• peacedot.sourceforge.net
• peace.stanford.edu
  

Joseph Assi was born in a Christian refugee camp in Lebanon and spent his entire life there until he was chosen to be a cast member of the second season of “On the Road in America,” a documentary-reality TV series about four young Middle Easterners traveling across the U.S. by RV. (On the Road in America, Season II, will air next year.)

Traveling to the United States this summer was the first time he had been on a plane or left Lebanon. His grandfather came to the camp 64 years ago and his father was also born in the camp.

I recently sat down with Joseph to talk about some of his impressions of America and the world prior to the show and what he had learned from traveling around the United States.

His impressions of the United States were not very favorable before the show:

“America prior to the show is the enemy in disguise because our first enemy is Israel and the enemy behind that is America because America is giving money to Israel, is giving weapons to Israel . . . and supporting all kind of acts that Israel does.

During the show, Joseph befriended Guy Livneh, an Israeli Jew and one of the crew members, something he never anticipated would happen:

“I never expected to be friends with an Israeli. And I always thought that Israeli is an enemy and the only way to talk with an Israeli is through a bullet. And that changed really fast; that changed in less than a month because meeting Guy, seeing how much we are similar, seeing how nice he . . . I stopped being able to remember him as an Israeli, I started remembering him as a human, as an artist, as a friend. An Israeli wasn’t his only description; it became, it became a secondary thing.”

Watch the video for the rest of the interview.

David Saranga (@davidsaranga), former consul for media and public affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York, spoke about how they had hosted the first ever governmental press conference last December on Twitter when fighting in Gaza was occurring. The press conference, covered by mainstream media worldwide including the New York Times and the blogosphere, consisted of four people on laptops. The New York Times printed some of the questions they took, which they answered in Twitter shorthand:

Question from peoplesworld: 40 years of military confrontation hasn’t brought security to Israel, why is this different?
Answer from israelconsulate: We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?

backlotops: 1 side has to stop. Why continue what hasn’t worked (mass arial/grnd retaliation)? Arab Peace Initiative?
israelconsulate: we R pro nego. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live.

At Tuesday’s #140conf, Saranga said that they had quickly accrued 4,000 followers after announcing the December Twitter press conference, though he acknowledged that numbers are not the only form of measurement.

“You might say that quantity is not the only criteria. I agree….Around 20 percent of the people were either bloggers or journalists or leader opinions in the social media world. In other words we had here, or we have here a direct tool in order to multiply the message. Every tweet or every message that we upload there are around 20 percent of those followers, of those 7,000 followers… who can multiply the message. And this is a very, very important tool for us as a government, it’s very important tool for us as a consulate in order to bring our message.”

Saranga said that he was warned by Jersusalem not to neglect conventional media.

“It’s not one instead of the other. It’s the fusion here which is important. You can take one message that appears on the conventional media and amplify it by bringing it to a new platform, in this case Twitter. And people started to understand it. People started to understand that we’re talking here about joining the old media with the new methods [of] the new media…
“As I said, people can talk directly to a government. In the past when people were thinking about a government or about the representative of a certain government they would think about the entity with no face, with no name. All of a sudden Twitter allows us to have a face. People know who are the people they are talking to. Once again, it’s a revolution.”

Allowing people to connect in ways they hadn’t connected before and to form new relationships was a theme throughout many of Tuesday’s talks. Porter Gale (@porter VA), vice president of marketing for Virgin America – the first airline to have wifi on all of its airplanes – told the story of a new doctor who had just graduated from medical school tweeting about her excitement to have graduated and to be flying Virgin America. Virgin America retweeted her tweet and got someone seated three rows in front of her to buy her champagne. (I hope the generous passenger in row 4 got a drink on the house.)

Gale’s observation about Twitter connecting people was a popular one with attendees and retweeted multiple times:

buffyjhamilton RT @isteconnects: RT @NMHS_Principal: Social media allows 4vconversations & rltshps. to occur/form that never would have @porterVA #140conf

Cellist Peter Gregson (@petergregson) played a piece while real time tweets commenting on the music played on the screen behind him. A classical musical performance is usually one-way experience, but the interactive nature was popular with attendees:

patrick_koppula @petergregson cello performance is captivating excellent use of twitter visuals to enhance listening. wish he could play more!

One of the biggest applause lines came during the talk on Google Wave when it was announced that attendees would be receiving a Google Wave invite. The Wave is still in Beta, but giving all the attendees at the #140conf an invite was probably a wise move since they were, judging by the simultaneous tweets with the #140conf hashtag, a prolific, collaborative, early adopter-type target audience most likely to use the Wave. At one point, #140conf was a top trending topic on Twitter.

The conference, organized by Jeff Keni Pulver (@JeffPulver) is continuing today with additional talks on “The making of: twittamentary,” “The making of an Internet (twitter) Celebrity” and “Twitter for Rockstars.”

It’s easy to say that Sesame Street has universal appeal when you consider that it is aired in over 120 countries. But in fact, it’s tailored to take into account different geography and culture, with nearly 30 international co-productions. Sesame Workshop, the non-profit producer of the show, also counts as its sponsors, corporations such as McDonalds and governmental agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development, the Education Department and the Defense Department. It also receives international funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Sesame Street made the news, and some waves, in 2002 when it debuted Kami, an HIV-positive muppet in its South African version of the show. As recounted in a September 2002 Time Magazine article, AIDS affected almost one in nine South Africans and a major stigma was associated with it. Kami – whose name is the Tswana tribal word for “acceptance” – was created as a “perky, fun-loving and healthy HIV-positive character with a wealth of information about HIV/AIDS to share with her inquisitive friends.”

Her character was intended to challenge the stereotype of the sickly child and, the article noted, “She will also introduce basic information and promote discussion about such uncuddly issues as death and social ostracism. In an episode next month, Kami has to deal with rejection at school because of her condition. Kami wins over her classmates, teaching the other children a lesson in tolerance and understanding of her sickness. ‘Kami is no outcast — far from it,’ says [Britain, the production manager of Takalani Sesame]. ‘She’s lovable, and she’s loved.’”

South Africa isn’t the only country to navigate sensitive social and political issues in its programming. The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy and interesting article by Samantha A. Shapiro this week about Shara’a Simsim, the Palestinian version of Sesame Street.

As it notes:

“But in each co-production, at least in its early years, every detail — every character, every scene and every line of script — must be approved by executives in the Sesame Workshop office, near Lincoln Center. This requires a delicate balance: how to promote the ‘core values’ of Sesame Street, like optimism and tolerance, while at the same time portraying a version of local life realistic enough that broadcasters will show it and parents will let their kids watch. The Palestinian territories have been, not surprisingly, a tough place to strike this balance, Sesame executives say, rivaled only by Kosovo.”

Sesame Street isn’t the only Palestinian children’s show trying to promote particular values:

“The official Hamas channel, Al-Aqsa television, has several children’s shows, and Al-Aqsa’s director of children’s programming, Abu Amr, told me the network is considering starting a station devoted entirely to children. Al-Aqsa TV’s most famous (and infamous) children’s program is “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” in which Saraa, a Palestinian girl, and several animal characters teach ideological lessons: why it is bad to speak English and good to memorize the whole Koran; how the Danes are infidels who should be killed. Occasionally an animal character will die as a martyr for Palestine.”

Initially, the Palestinian version of Sesame Street was a joint production with Israeli Educational TV, but the process of agreeing on even minor details was arduous. There were disagreements over where the Israeli and Palestinian Muppets should meet – a neutral third area? a park divided by a low wall? – with the eventual decision that they would visit each other on their own streets.

“They finally agreed that the Muppets would visit one another’s streets rather than meet in a park. But again, controversy arose: the Israelis were in favor of spontaneous Muppet drop-bys, but the Palestinians insisted the visits had to be by invitation only. ‘The only Israelis who come to Palestinian neighborhoods uninvited are settlers,’ Kuttab explained to me.”

Eventually, after the second intifada in Sept. 2000 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the productions stopped creating segments featuring Israeli and Palestinian characters. The plan was instead that Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli shows would independently shoot their own programs but show about 10 segments from the other productions, redubbed into Hebrew or Arabic. But while the Israeli version lived up to the plan, the Palestinians only showed a handful of Israeli segments and the Jordanians none.

The latest incarnation of the Palestinian show, called “Shara’a Simsim” was first broadcast in 2007 and does not include any Israeli segments.

The article also has some interesting notes about Layla Sayegh, the supervisor of the day-to-day operations of “Simsim.”

Sayegh’s previous job has spent three decades working for the Palestinian Liberation Organization and her job just prior to “Simsim” was working in the prime minister’s office for the Palestinian Authority.

“I had thought that, like Nuseibeh, Sayegh would want Palestinian kids to be educated early about their political situation. But when I asked Sayegh about this, she said that working at ‘Simsim,’ as apolitical as it tried to be, was a way of serving the Palestinian people as much as her previous job in the prime minister’s office was. ‘In government, there are issues you can’t change because of which party’s in power,’ she said. ‘But here I feel very effective.’

“WHEN I ASKED Sayegh exactly how producing a fledgling puppet show was more effective than working for the prime minister, she told me about Muppet ‘walkarounds.’ Every few months, ‘Simsim’ brings human-size versions of the Palestinian Muppets to schools to publicize the show and to promote early-childhood education. ‘I sit and I look back at the eyes of the kids,’ Sayegh told me. ‘They suffer a lot, and during the show I can see how happy they get. I would like to do these shows twice a day, every day, in every village in Palestine.’

“I went with her one afternoon to a Muppet walkaround held at Al Ahli college, a Catholic school with the largest auditorium in Ramallah. Mini-buses from Ramallah’s preschools pulled into the courtyard and unloaded hundreds of 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, clad in sweaters or plaid jumpers emblazoned with their school logo. Their teachers herded them into the auditorium, where an actor and an actress appeared onstage in brightly colored overalls and performed a little skit. Then the actors called for the life-size Muppets to come out, and a wave of excitement swept through the room….

“Sayegh was facing the kids, just as she had described, and I turned around to look at what she found more important than working with the prime minister. The view from where she stood was a bobbing sea of hundreds of preschoolers, their open faces transparent with delight, excited to see what would happen next.”