As a nation brand, “Israel” is undeniably strong in some areas — technology, security, agriculture — yet marketing products as Israeli, and daring to pitch their Israeli-ness as a virtue, can be problematic.

Many Israeli companies, when competing internationally, are even a little shy about their place of origin. Which is why I was pleased to see the British supermarket Waitrose making as big a deal of the Israeli couscous in this TV dinner as it makes of Greek olives, Irish oats or Scottish salmon in other offerings.

And at Borough Market in London, I have recently seen “He’brew: The Chosen Beer” on sale in four flavours: Genesis Ale, Messiah Bold, Pomegranate Ale and Jewbelation Twelve (celebrating the brewer’s 12th anniversary).

Now, I know — because they invited me to Jerusalem to talk to them when I was head of place branding at Saffron — that the honchos at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs are very interested in promoting Israel in every benign way possible in order to round out the country’s reputation, the hardest edges of which are the ones most frequently seen and noted.

If I were the PR/image guys in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, I’d call up Waitrose and this beer company, and other non-Israeli companies that market either Israeli provenance or plain Jewishness, and pump them with questions about their thought processes and post-launch experiences. I bet they have useful insights.

Oddly, it’s common for companies to feel that choosing to put MADE IN ________ , in the case of a lot of countries less controversial than Israel, is an act of bravery. At Saffron, we had to push an Indian tyre company, for example, to emphasize its tyres provenance rather than downplay it (hey, if these vulcanized babies are good enough for the worst roads on earth, we argued, certainly they’re good enough for your [German, French, British, and so on] roads!), and I remember we undertook similar acts of persuasion in Turkey, Romania and the Basque Country, too.