Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 63, 90

Special Report

Partners for Peace—Jerusalem Women Speak Tour: A Case Study in Generating Media Coverage

By Peter Wirth

Activists who despair of getting mainstream media coverage of even-handed efforts to acquaint Americans with Middle Eastern realities can take heart from a recent highly successful coast-to-coast tour of three women from Jerusalem. Nahla Asali, a Muslim Palestinian, Michal Shohat, a Jewish Israeli, and Claudette Habesch, a Christian Palestinian, visited 10 U.S. cities in 17 days between Jan. 6 and Jan. 24.

Habesch is secretary-general of the Jerusalem Holy Land office for the Catholic relief organization Caritas. Shohat is a three-term member of Jerusalem’s municipal council from Israel’s Meretz Party. Asali is an instructor in English literature at Birzeit University on the West Bank and co-founder and chair of the Saraya Center for Community Services in Jerusalem.

The cities were: Minneapolis/St.Paul, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, Roanoke, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Princeton and Washington, DC. The goal of the tour was to expose U.S. audiences to the hopes, fears and frustrations of three wives and mothers who are active in their communities and who are personally distraught over the current stalemate in the peace process.

Recruitment

The three women, recruited by Jerri Bird, executive director of Partners for Peace, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization, were asked to come under the banner: “Jerusalem Women Speak—Three Women, Three Faiths, One Shared City—Jerusalem.”

They did not know each other and met for the first time over tea about 10 days before they arrived in the United States. They came to Jerri Bird's home directly from the airport and were met there by Caryle Murphy of The Washington Post, who was the first to interview them. It was only then that they heard each other's views. Audiences were fascinated with these facts and always asked, “Do you fight?” Throughout the entire 17 days the answer remained, “Not yet!”

Plan

From day one the tour was designed with the media in mind. When we selected the women we immediately asked them for bios and later asked each to write a 600-word op-ed which gave us additional material to work with. The comprehensive bios were very helpful. For example, Nahla Asali attended a university in the Midwest in the 1960s. We contacted the alumni publication and they accepted the op-ed she wrote. Her message reached an additional 60,000 people.

We informed the women the tour would include radio, TV and print interviews and talk show appearances and provided them with a few hours of basic training when they arrived in how to handle interviews.

The theme of the tour was designed to attract media interest and also gave us a number of different “news pegs” on which to hang our story. We used the “women angle,” the “religious angle” and the “foreign policy angle.”

We contacted religious press, secular press, periodicals and radio and TV talk shows locally in each city they visited and syndicated national media outlets. Our press contacts started several months before the women arrived.

Partners for Peace in Washington approached “key people” in each community to handle local logistics such as home stays, local transportation and publicity. These key people were essential in designing the local events and advising about important local media contacts. The tour could not have had such enormous impact without their devoted efforts

We made it clear to the organizers in each city that our goal was to reach the entire population with the message of the three women. For example, in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota we provided the organizers with a sample press release and, if asked, made calls to key reporters for them. The local organizers were a great assert.

There was a troika for each city—the key people, the Partners for Peace Washington office and the writer of this article, a media specialist working on contract.

Audiences and Response

The schedule was designed to include at least one public event, usually an interfaith program; a prestigious venue such as a World Affairs Council or City Club; and a meeting with an active local group. In San Francisco they met with the Israeli-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue Group and the World Affairs Council. Their schedule in each city usually included meetings with religious leaders and groups in churches and mosques. They stayed in the homes of people in the community.

Almost without exception the audiences were standing-room-only and were uniformly enthusiastic about the effectiveness of these women in expressing their views. Sometimes there were contentious questions, but these were the exception, and audiences were clearly inspired.

In a Catholic church in Minneapolis the women addressed the two morning services, each with 1,250 parishioners, and received a standing ovation with promises by the parishioners to make their views known to their elected officials.

In St. Louis, at a luncheon sponsored by the Democratic Women's Forum of Greater St. Louis, a hundred women listened with rapt attention as Michal Shohat took the initiative to respond to a criticism she had heard beforehand which charged her with being “anti-Israel.” It was a tense few minutes, but her articulate defense, which ended with her conviction that Israel had to learn to live alongside Palestinians in a state of their own if there was to be a future for her children, was met with resounding applause.

A strength of the presentations lay in the clear differences in approach between the two Palestinians and the Israeli. It was their unanimity of purpose, however, and their shared conviction that politicians were destroying the future for their children which won over audience after audience.

Presented and promoted as ordinary women, they quickly proved themselves extraordinary and gained respect from audiences for their courage and strength in facing criticisms from their own cultural groups. One Arab American attacked the Palestinians for not continuing the intifada, to which Claudette Habesch replied: “Perhaps you would like to send us your children to go into the streets.”

Media Coverage

The media coverage was nothing less than phenomenal, particularly in view of experiences of groups in many of these cities whose past activities often have been largely ignored. The Jerusalem Women Speak tour was designed to give a voice to each religious community, to the two national communities, and to women rather than male politicians. This lent credibility and distinctiveness and was an easy sell.

Talk show hosts were uniformly enthusiastic. Interview shows and specialty television programs found them interesting, and there was even some coverage of them on local television news shows.

This didn't just happen. The largest share of time in putting together the tour was spent obtaining media coverage, but of course that is the most rewarding kind of effort in terms of numbers of contacts made.

A classic example is the amount of time required to try to put together an interfaith event. Contacts with all the churches, mosques and synagogues must be made and an effort exerted to persuade these religious leaders that it is worthwhile and that they should promote attendance by their congregations. Flyers must be prepared, reminders sent out, physical arrangements made. And then, if you are lucky, you might have one hundred people turn out. On the other hand, the same amount of time spent “pitching” your speakers to a talk show host will result in an audience of tens of thousands.

By adding the circulation figures for the print media that covered the tour and the listenership figures for radio and television, we calculate over 210,000,000 contacts worldwide and over 80,000,000 inside the United States. There were at least 32 print articles published. There were 14 interview or talk show programs aired on radio stations, with five of those syndicated reaching 595 additional radio stations.

Television coverage was also extensive and difficult to measure. CBC (Canada), VOA (English Service), VOA (Arabic Service), PBS-Blue Ridge Public TV, Atlanta Interfaith (statewide cable), Bay Watch TV-Channel 35 in San Francisco, TVW Cable Channel in Seattle, a CBS affiliate in St. Louis program called “Confluence,” MTN Cable TV in Minneapolis, C-SPAN-Washington, DC (World Affairs Council program), Abu Dhabi TV cable and satellite covering the Middle East, Europe and the U.S., and a program called “Religion and Ethics” which airs on 200 PBS stations in 190 markets, as well as CNN coverage of the National Press Club Morning Newsmaker event represent some of the television coverage.

Newspaper coverage included The Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Palm Beach Post, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Seattle Times, Seattle Post Intelligencer, San Jose Mercury and Atlanta Journal Constitution.

And the coverage still continues. The Chicago Tribune ran a feature story in its April 12 Sunday edition, circulation one million, and a reporter from Japan has interviewed them for a feature story in the Jerusalem Times.

This tour should encourage other Middle East peace activists to refuse to accept “the common wisdom” that the mainstream media is largely inaccessible to those of us who present another view on the Middle East.