the national election campaign of 1992 in Israel was a very very dramatic one At the time Israel was under a terrorism attack very violent with high tension between Israelis and Palestinians there were also economic difficulties because the world did not accept Israeli politics positively many companies refrained from doing business with Israel Yitzhak Rabin the hero of the Six Day War in 1967 was Israel’s national hero and decided he would run for Prime Minister in order to extricate Israel from its predicament and begin a process that would first reach agreement with the Palestinians followed by a peace agreement it wasn’t easy, because Israel was sharply split between Left and Right it was nearly impossible to take a rightwing candidate and ‘sell’ him to the Left, or a leftwing candidate and sell him to the Right Rabin came from the Left and despite his high stature in Israeli society and the fact that nearly everyone recognized he was an extraordinary person it was not easy to ‘sell’ him to the public at large, as Prime Minister I recall the day I was driving with a woman named Amalia my budget manager in the office we were going to a meeting with a client and on the way we passed signs put up by a messianic Jewish group known as Chabad The signs showed the familiar image of the Chabad Lubavitscher Rebbe who had passed away, with the heading: the Messiah is Coming! This campaign was not unrealistic because it reflected the amount of stress desperation the search for a messiah a helping hand and like in many other cases the mystics bring their own solutions a deceased Rabbi who would rescue us, from heaven So we drove along, and I am pondering how do we ‘sell’ Rabin to the public? Naturally, when you present a politician you present his qualities, his history, his personality his family, his interests, and you focus on the person As we were driving I looked at the big signs as we passed by and a possibility came to me The possibility, the option, was, NOT to talk about Rabin but to talk about Israel! Talking about Rabin would not necessarily cause the voters on the Right to identify with him what does Israel want do what does Israel aspire? the solution is Rabin and then I said to Amalya, sitting next to me they say: “See, they say, the Messiah is coming!” we will say: “Israel is waiting for Rabin” she said at once: “that’s our campaign!” she had excellent intuition, she said “that’s our campaign!” and the campaign was indeed very different, unique and spoke to the wider public it touched the souls of Israelis it spoke about where we are now, what we feel now and what we now dream about, and what we are waiting for and the answer was, we are waiting for this man of course, you can’t build EVERY campaign on just anyone because Rabin was someone who had already brought salvation to Israel saving them in the Six Day War but the ability to make people identify so widely and so deeply by making the center of the campaign not the leader but the people themselves was responsible for this campaign’s success Rabin was elected he signed the Oslo Agreements Rabin opened the way for a Palestinian state this was the start of a very long, very painful very complex road, we are still struggling with it but without Oslo it would not have happened Rabin also opened us to the world the world saddened came to Israel by the way, we (Kesher Barel) profited directly because until Rabin’s peace agreement no global ad agency was prepared to work with Israel after the Oslo peace agreements McCann Erickson came to us and added us to their international network it would not have happened without the Oslo accord and like McCann Erickson many other international companies, in every realm, came to Israel and Israel became part of the global economy without the Oslo agreement Israel was not part of the global economy to a great extent I regard this campaign as the most important thing I did in my 30 years in advertising because though I did many other interesting things in consumer goods and services, and in financial services and other areas this campaign was one that touched our lives my life, the lives of my family, my friends the lives of the nation in which I live and the change that occurs within it And when I question and ask myself whether I went into the right occupation I answer, yes, I did, if only because of this (Rabin) campaign