A Scientologist on Netanyahu's Team
Below the belt, without remorse
"The prime minister is in shock," a government official who had been involved in dealing with the demonstration by angry Holocaust survivors against Ehud Olmert, said this week.
"He is trying to make a distinction between the survivors' campaigners and the survivors themselves, and he still doesn't believe that he fell into the hands of those drecks, Motti Morell and Ronen Tzur."
Morell and Tzur had made the decision two years ago that the survivors would remove their false teeth, dress in concentration camp uniforms and wear a yellow Star of David patch.
The Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund had then hired their services as media advisers and strategists (financed mostly by the millionaire Noam Lanir), and Morell and Tzur for their part promised to attack and embarrass anyone who would try to prevent an increase in the payments made to the survivors.
One of their suggestions was to set up a camp for survivors, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, opposite the government ministries compound in Jerusalem, and to call on major donors to boycott Israel until the survivors' plight was resolved.
As they had hoped, they generated a shift in public opinion by helping to fund and produce a documentary film by Orly Vilnai Federbush and Guy Maroz on the survivors' plight, which was screened on Channel 2.
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Morell and Tzur describe their recent campaigns as deriving from a belief in their clients, and as being based on "dissemination of the truth." But it's not always possible to discern those elements in the firm's campaigns.
At the height of the second intifada, for example, Morell ran information campaigns for the Foreign Ministry aimed at enhancing Israel's image.
One day, a man whom those present describe as "weird" came in and offered to invest half-a-million dollars in a campaign against the government of France, calling for a boycott by Israelis of every French person and product, in reaction to positions this person perceived to be pro-Palestinian.
Morell, it is said, agreed to go ahead with the effort, despite the fact that it might have had a negative effect on the Foreign Ministry campaign. The campaign never got off the ground, as the rather dubious client disappeared.
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Adding to Morell's enigmatic image is his deep immersion in Scientology. He has many books on the subject at home and in his office, takes courses and believes in education in the spirit of Scientology.
As a devotee of Scientology, Morell in the past held that psychiatrists established the gas chambers and had imparted the theory of race to Hitler. He is partner to one of the fiercest campaigns of Scientology throughout the world - against the use of Ritalin - and was a member, as a representative of the public, on a Health Ministry committee that addressed the issue.
The committee was appointed by Yehoshua Matza, the health minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose campaign for prime minister Morell ran. Scientology was also integrated into the firm's work, when an organizational consultant who draws on the doctrine was hired to work with the staff, and job candidates were given tests based on Scientology.
"Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, wrote many courses on advertising, public relations and marketing, and when I read them I saw they matched what I had learned in practice, my beliefs," Morell relates.
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