South African Democracy and Prospects for Israel/Palestine: The Role of Marketing Politics

Very few researchers have examined how states and nonstate entities market not only their political culture and recreational activities to attract buyers but more fundamentally their policies and their identities in order to bolster nationalism and political legitimacy. Thus our research problem was threefold: 1) how do political players market their agendas in the Israel-Palestinian conflict; 2) given that political players marketed their strategies in order to bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa, and that analysts draw parallels between the South African and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, are the marketing strategies similar; and 3) do current marketing tactics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foreshadow peace or conflict? As a methodological note, we consulted and used content-analysis of newspaper articles, accessed archives of South African, pro-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian activist campaigns, and we conducted open-ended interviews of involved activists and government officials. Results thus far indicate that most activists are learning from the South Aftican case and are carefully repackaging their strategies so as to promote peace and interdependence rather than encouraging divisions between religions, ethnicities, genders, etc. However, some activists market their agendas in a way that requires the marketing of the Other in a dehumanizing or deligitimizing way. Those particular activists have a strong pull, financially and politically, within the United States and/or draw the most media attention. As such while the prospects for peace on the ground and within transnational networks are strong, some in the United States and some members of the international community are actively contributing to the conflict because they have been captivated more by the conflict-based rather than intersubjective/peace-based marketing strategies. The implications are that activist groups with fewer resources or those that are less appealing to media sources must leverage funding and media in a different way in order to promote their marketing strategies. We propose that our theoretical framework might be useful in investigating the prospects for peace in other conflict zones