Illegal Settlements Mounts Charm Offensive
A youngster with long sidelocks and a skullcap was showing a slide presentation. Two steps away stood his mother, a smiling American woman in her 30s wearing a broad skirt, her hair covered with a scarf. She was gesturing at the screen and speaking passionately.
The woman, Aviela Deitch, repeatedly said that before them stood a normal woman with a normal family in a community of normal people. Just plain normal.
Deitch lives in the outpost of Migron, whose residents know quite well what Israelis think of them. Her lecture is one of Migron’s attempts to change all that.
The people from the outpost began these parlor meetings three months ago, to give their story without the intervention of the media. Their PR campaign began after a number of Migron’s families were evacuated in the middle of the night in September; the High Court had ruled that the outpost sits on private Palestinian land that must be evacuated by the end of March.
The battle, everyone there understood, was a PR battle, and if they wanted to win they had to change strategy fast.
For more, go to Haaretz.com
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