Recently, an email has been circulating, calling on American talk show mogul Oprah Winfrey to visit the Palestinian territories in her upcoming trip to Israel. Apparently, Oprah will make her “pilgrimage” to Israel upon invitation by Eli Weisel, an American-Jewish author, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor. Winfrey made her announcement last week when she was honored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity for her continued involvement in humanitarian issues.

During the announcement, Winfrey expressed her support for the people of Israel where, according to Weisel, “the major war against terror is currently taking place,” saying she sympathized with the suffering of the Israeli people.

While the blind allegiance most Americans have towards Israel is no shocker to the Palestinians, the fact that a personality such as Oprah Winfrey – known for her compassion with the world’s underdogs – would sidestep the Palestinian cause with such nonchalance was a surprise even to us.

Not that the announcement of her intended visit has gone unnoticed entirely. Other than the email demanding letters to her producers, blog sites across the internet have posted viewpoints on the subject from all sides.

One blogger named Desert Peace wrote, “I only hope that if she comes here she will visit places like Ramallah, Jenin, Gaza, Bethlehem…. the list goes on. Let her watch the demolition of a home in East Jerusalem, let her visit the site of the disabled children’s home demolished a few weeks ago. Let her visit with Bassam Aramin, the father of 10 year old Abir, murdered by Israeli soldiers while at play in her schoolyard. Let her stand at a checkpoint and watch a pregnant Palestinian woman be prevented from going to the hospital to have her child.”

Still, simply hoping that Oprah Winfrey will heed these calls can hardly be called a concerted effort. But again, this has always been the Palestinians’ problem in dealing with the international media. While our hearts are undoubtedly in the right places, our strategies are not.

Take for example, the ongoing Israeli onslaught in the Gaza Strip. Dozens of people have been killed in the last few weeks alone. Buildings have been bombed, cars blown to smithereens and children carried, wailing in pain, to hospital emergency rooms with missile shrapnel lodged in their heads, chests and legs. The Palestinians are well aware how dire the situation is. We are extremely talented at bemoaning our fate to each other, ticking off the horrors perpetrated by the Israeli occupation like a checklist at a grocery store. We cry out at the injustices against us and bury our dead day after day. But, history and experience has proven to us that this is not enough, that our strategy has not served us well in bringing our cause the attention it deserves.

Contrastingly there is the almighty Israeli and Western media machine. Take the same situation – the Gaza Strip – and the picture is painted with a wicked twist. Israel maintains that the Palestinians have forced its hand. It is the duty of the establishment to protect the innocent civilians of Sderot from the terrors of the Qassam rockets, which, for the record, have only killed two Israelis in the past several months and have caused minimal damage otherwise.

While there is truth to this version – Palestinians do fire crudely-made rockets into Israel – the manner in which the tale is told leaves no room for the Palestinians to be shown in any positive light.

So, where do we go wrong time and again? It is true that from the get-go, the Palestinians have already been given the short end of the stick because of the West’s alliance with Israel. Having said that, our public relations machine is still extremely lacking in waging this media war, which in humanitarian terms, we should have won hands-down given the justness of our cause.

When assessing the Palestinians’ performance over the years in terms of our relationship with the international media, one element is clearly absent, which is calculated consistency. Instead of our public relations machine – which includes popular mobilization and organization especially in places such as the United States and Europe – working around the clock to find ways to counter Israeli allegations and put forth our own cause more effectively, we have fallen into the trap of being emotional activists. That is, we react to a certain event or statement instead of devising a well-thought out strategy of our own that would yield better results in the long-run.

The best analogy would be the “boiled-over coffee syndrome”. Israel commits a massacre in the Gaza Strip, killing men, women and children and the Palestinian and Arab community rises up in anger. Demonstrations break out wherever there are Palestinians and we raise our fists in fury. But the coffee eventually settles and the demonstrations and anger die down until the next atrocity. Meanwhile, Israel is calmly and coolly working behind the scenes, making all the politically-correct statements about “regret for the loss of civilian lives” while emphasizing the horror in which the Israeli people live everyday because of the “terrorists” being allowed to flourish in the Strip. And never, not once, do the Israeli military operations stop.

Oprah Winfrey is only the most recent example of someone who “should know better.” But she cannot fully be blamed for her bias. There is no better time than now to contemplate why such an otherwise enlightened public figure would squarely place her loyalties with Israel. No one is saying Oprah should not be allowed to make her trip to Israel with her good friend Wiesel. But the Palestinians – government, people, organizations and solidarity groups – should ensure that Ms. Winfrey comes with an open mind and a travel package complete with information on the entire country. Maybe if she crossed one Israeli checkpoint, set eyes on the offending separation wall or witnessed the poverty that has set in throughout the Palestinian territories due to the international boycott, the human suffering of a people she has so far not cared to understand will be revealed to her.

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Programme at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mip@miftah.org.