COMEDY

E. NOUGH AT "THINKING MEAT" HAS SOME VERY TONGUE IN CHEEK ADVICE FOR ISRAEL.  READ THE WHOLE THING.  HERE ARE SOME EXCERPTS:

A Modest Open Letter
Dear Israel,

It has become painfully clear over the past few decades that you, as a nation, have a severe image problem internationally. This problem is not just with openly hostile governments that have promised on many occasions to destroy you and murder your citizens wholesale; rather, it extends to inter-governmental assemblies such as the United Nations, progressive non-governmental organizations, the global press, and the academic intelligentsia, combining into what has commonly come to be called "world opinion." I believe it would be of some benefit to consider the ways in which you can bring this world opinion to your side, and gain sympathy and respect, if not outright admiration, from nations the world over....

First, let us consider some suboptimal ways of getting on the good side of global opinion. These work, but the harm they do to your own nation tends to outweigh any benefit, so they aren't particularly recommended:

• You can surrender to the Arabs. Put down your weapons, drop to your knees, and allow them to overrun the place. This will reduce you from your current position of strength, to that of innocent victims. The world loves helpless, innocent victims! Consider all the sympathy and support you got just after the Holocaust, when Jews was synonymous with skeletal Auschwitz victims. Why, the Europeans couldn't support you enough, just as long as you didn't hang around in Europe! (After all, helpless innocent victims are fine and good, as long as they are not camped out on the front lawn. That just spoils the scenery!)
  This solution has been employed multiple times over the past 100 years or so, all with roughly the same results: sympathy galore. Just ask the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Rwandans, or the Sudanese in Darfur. The problem, of course, is that sympathy is all you get, and that's worth about as much as one of Arafat's commitments to peace -- so you'll end up exactly like the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Rwandans, or the Sudanese in Darfur. Or, more likely and more to the point, like the Auschwitz victims that never left the camp.
  
• You can become an enemy of the United States. It's wacky but true: if you are opposed to the United States, you can expect widespread global support, regardless of your own failings. You can set up a mass-murdering police state, invade two countries, and kill entire villages with poison gas, but if you oppose the United States, you'll be the lesser evil. There are several problems with this approach, of course, not least of which is that there is no guarantee that it will work for you. There simply isn't enough empirical data to determine whether, in opposition to the U.S., you'd actually be viewed as the lesser evil. It certainly worked for Iraq and North Korea, but then neither of them is run by Jews.
  Another problem is that being an enemy of the U.S., while popular, is exceedingly dangerous. Since 2001, at least two countries that engaged in this have had a radical change of government, preceded by some very loud urban renewal courtesy of the U.S. military. (By contrast, slaughtering Spanish citizens and Filipino expats has brought extremely promising results. You should keep this in mind.) At any rate, when picking one's enemies, the United States is probably not the best choice. Of course, in your case this option is barred even more by your strategic dependence upon the U.S. That problem is addressable, and we'll get to it shortly; nonetheless, it's easy to see that gaining popularity by being anti-U.S. is not really a viable option.

REALLY, READ THE WHOLE THING.