The Prime Minister’s Office was disappointed this week. It had learned that even after flying dozens of foreign journalists to Eilat on March 10, in a rented aircraft, the international media still wasn’t impressed by the capture of the Iranian arms ship Klos-C. The incident received only minor coverage in the US and Europe’s main media outlets, even after the booty display presented by the prime minister himself before the cameras, with an Israel flag and Iranian missiles behind him. Nor were they impressed by his ominous statement that Iran would be, in the future, smuggling nuclear suitcases as well.
Israel hoped that the seizure of the Klos-C will harm Iranian legitimacy, just as the seizure of the Karine A ship in 2002 was damaging to late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat. That didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to deem this media campaign as a public diplomacy failure, like other failures that Israelis have gotten used to over the past few years. In this particular case, the chances of the Iranian vessel becoming a hot item in the international media were small from the very outset. Nor does the labor strike by the Foreign Ministry’s staff have anything to do with the meager results of this campaign, despite what the staffers say. International coverage would still be sparse, even if the Israeli spokesmen would have been interviewed in Spanish, French and Italian.
