Ambassador Ido Aharoni Aronoff is scheduled to speak at the Jewish National Fund USA’s Breakfast for Israel in Cincinnati on May 7.
He has spent 25 years working as a diplomat and served as Consul General in New York. While serving in Israel’s foreign service, he was a policy advisor to Shimon Peres during the negotiations that led to the Oslo Peace Accords. Aronoff came to diplomacy by an unlikely path, leaving a career in Israeli television to join the foreign service.
He spent several years at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, where he worked directly with the major studios. Aronoff built his approach to diplomacy around what he calls “diplomacy of opportunities,” leading with cultural and creative assets rather than conflict.
He now serves as Global Distinguished Professor of Business at Touro University and Tel Aviv University. We spoke about social media, the state of Israel’s story, and whether peace is still possible.
Editor’s Note: This Q and A was edited for length and clarity.
Q: Ambassador, thank you for taking the time to speak. You’re heading to Cincinnati. Have you spent time in the Midwest before?
A: Yes, I’ve been to Cincinnati several times, beginning about 25 years ago. I did some speaking for Israel Bonds and other Jewish organizations. I remember staying at a hotel downtown during Oktoberfest. Twenty-five years later, that memory is still with me, and not because someone was advocating for the city. The place just displayed its qualities, and I connected. That’s actually the kind of diplomacy I believe in.
Q: You studied film and television, then fell into a diplomatic career. How did that happen?
A: I never dreamed of becoming a diplomat. After the army, I studied film and TV and started working for Israeli television. When the first Gulf War broke out, there was an opportunity to join the Foreign Service as a cadet. I thought, I’m curious about foreign affairs, why not try? They accept a handful of candidates out of thousands of applicants, and somehow, I got in.
My entire career turned out to be in the United States, almost entirely in public diplomacy, which means emphasizing the soft assets of a country. Everyone knows Israel’s hard assets: the military, the technology. But soft power is what creates emotional connection. And when you look at history, including why the Cold War ended the way it did, it’s soft power that makes the lasting difference.
Q: Does your background in storytelling shape how you approach diplomacy?
A: Absolutely. When you look at the history of the Jewish people, one of the reasons for their survival across the ages is the ability to tell a story — to connect communities that are geographically dispersed through a common narrative. I believe we’re facing a crisis today because we are no longer telling that story effectively. We’re no longer able to instill pride. Social media has a lot to do with that.
Q: Will you be addressing how social media has become a dividing force?
A: It is functioning as a dividing force right now. Our brains were never designed to handle this barrage of information, so we look for simplicity, simple slogans, simple ideas that help make sense of a chaotic reality. The algorithm caters to that.
As a result, people consume enormous amounts of information, usually mindlessly, without critical judgment. The algorithm feeds us what we already want, which isolates us from other ideas and makes us less tolerant of them. You see it in the rise of populism worldwide, in the increase in hate crimes, and in the sharp rise in reported anxiety, depression, and loneliness. These are byproducts of the technological revolution.
Q: How can that feedback loop be countered?
A: The system is rigged in the sense that we are simply outnumbered. What we need is engagement through third-party endorsement, other people speaking on your behalf, organically, rather than self-congratulatory advocacy. American popular culture is the best example. It’s celebrated worldwide, and it’s America’s single greatest diplomatic asset, whether American diplomats realize it or not.
Israel is attractive in similar ways. The Jewish National Fund, for whom I’ll be speaking, is building a culinary academy in the Upper Galilee where people can come and learn to prepare food from the region, think about what that means to Christians, to Jews. They’re also developing an educational village in the Israeli desert, a Global Zionist Village with 1,500 beds for youth from around the world. The goal is to give people the complexity that is absent from the current online conversation.
Q: Is there a gap between how Israelis see themselves and how their supporters abroad see Israel?
A: It’s a huge gap. For a long time, Israel was clearly the victim, and humans are programmed to sympathize with victims; it’s part of our culture, our Judeo-Christian heritage. But once Israel became a power, beginning with the Six Day War in 1967 and more forcefully after the Lebanon invasion in 1982, the dynamic shifted. The Palestinian national movement gained traction, and the Soviets, this is often forgotten, were actively promoting the framing we still hear today.
The terms “genocide” and “apartheid” were applied to Israel by Soviet-backed campaigns as early as the 1960s. None of this is new. What’s new is the technological environment. Today, “genocide” has become a matter of opinion rather than a legal and historical fact. People consuming information through TikTok, with a five-second retention span, have no room for nuance or complexity.
Q: Do you see any path toward renewed Peace negotiations?
A: Diplomacy is a peculiar thing. Very few Israelis thought in October 1973 that less than six years later there would be a full peace treaty with Egypt, which had been Israel’s bitterest enemy. Events like October 7th have a tendency to dramatically reshape the geopolitical landscape. Whatever your position on a two-state solution, you cannot deny there are millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and that nearly 20 percent of Israel’s own citizens are Israeli Arabs who politically identify with the Palestinian national movement.
The question of what we do about that has to be answered. October 7th, followed almost immediately by the campus protests in the United States and the weak response from university administrations, not to mention the displays of antisemitism across the Western world, has left Israelis severely traumatized. That makes it very hard to talk about progress right now. But remember, no one believed there would be peace with Egypt in 1973 either.
Q: If you had to distill Israel’s current moment into a single message, what would it be?
A: I’m a great believer in Theodor Herzl’s vision. In his 1902 utopian novel, written 46 years before Israel was established, he described Israel as a light unto the nations. I believe that remains the goal, to build a society that is an example to the world. Right now, that’s hard to say aloud, because this society is under military threat and has to fight, and war produces collateral damage and criticism.
A lot of people believe that weakness is by definition righteousness. It isn’t. But it’s too complex a point to make to someone getting their information from a six-second video. So, to me, the strategy is to highlight Israel’s creativity and spirit, a group of ordinary people who have achieved extraordinary things collectively.
On the day after October 7th, my son’s army unit expected 100 percent of its reservists to report. They had 150 percent show up. People on vacation, climbing mountains in Africa, dropped everything. You will not find a younger generation like this anywhere in the world, running toward the fire because they believe they’re making a difference.