“Israel’s foreign policy is passive, not proactive,” says Knesset Member Ronen Hoffman of the Yesh Atid party. “It’s not derived from any strategy, and this is something we must change.”

Hoffman chairs the Knesset’s Foreign and Defense Affairs’ Subcommittee on Public Diplomacy, the realization of a professional dream. Hoffman has a Ph.D. in international relations from King’s College, London, and has been researching and dealing in issues of diplomacy for most of his adult life. After the assassination of late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, he established the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. In January 2000 he served as secretary of the Israeli delegation to the peace talks between Israel and Syria in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. 

Hoffman contends that Israel’s foreign policy is in urgent need of a structural overhaul in order to deal with the challenges of public diplomacy. He is currently formulating an action plan that would redefine the authority granted by law to Israel’s foreign-affairs and public-diplomacy activities.

In recent years, due to political considerations within the ruling coalition, jobs and responsibilities were moved from the foreign ministry to newly established ministries: the Ministry of Information/Public Diplomacy, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs headed by Yuval Steinitz, the Defense Ministry and the prime minister’s office. This dispersal, by its very nature, makes it difficult to determine effective and coherent policy on public diplomacy.