Thursday, September 15, 2011
Elder of ZiyonNew York City subways have recently started to display advertisements calling for the end of US military aid to Israel, deliberately coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly sessions next week.
The 25 posters in 18 Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Bronx subway stations are part of a mass transit advertising campaign by Be On Our Side to remedy what the advertisements call “the flawed and skewed representation in mainstream media” of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The small print says that the New York ads were paid by The Wespac Foundation.
Its website has articles that say that Mahmoud Abbas is a secret Zionist agent. Another posting, from September 2010 when Israel had frozen construction in the territories and the US was seeking to get the PLO back to the negotiating table, quotes the "Palestinian community" in rejecting negotiations with Israel.
This campaign was done in conjunction with Jewish Voice for Peace, the fanatically anti-Israel movement that supports a full set of boycotting, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
But look at the alleged photos of Palestinian Arabs and Israelis who want "peace and justice"! Who could be against such noble goals?
When people hear the word "peace," they usually associate it with the kind of peace that is agreed upon by two or more parties in order for them to live together in harmony. Such a peace requires, by definition, compromise on both sides. This is how marriages work, this is how businesses cooperate, this is how nations work together. This kind of peace comes through negotiations and good will on the part of both parties.
But when the word "justice" is added to the formula, people mean something quite different. Invariably, a demand for "justice" is not a call for negotiations or compromise; it is a call for an imposed solution where one side wins and the other loses.
Justice means there is a right and a wrong, not that both parties have valid claims. Justice in the context of international conflicts demands that one party be seen as pure and good and the other as oppressive and evil.
The word "justice" is a code word that is used by anti-Israel organizations to act as a cover to destroying Israel and denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination.
The concept of "justice" is used (by groups such as "Students for Justice in Palestine" and many others) to claim that Palestinian Arabs have the only historic claim to the area, that Jews are Western colonialists, that Palestinian Arab suffering is solely the responsibility of Israel, that the descendants of Palestinian Arabs have the "right" to "return" to Israel and destroy the state demographically. Very often these same ""peace" groups will say that "justice" demands a Palestinian Arab right to terrorism ("armed resistance") as well.
If it was real "justice" they were after, they would demand that Jews continue to live in Gush Etzion and the entire Old City of Jerusalem where they were expelled in 1948. They would demand that Jordan compensate Israel for the destruction of dozens of synagogues in a single month. They would demand that residents of Sderot and Ashkelon be reimbursed by Hamas for the money spent on building rocket shelters. They would demand that convicted terrorists remain in jail for their full terms, and that Gilad Shalit be released immediately with no preconditions. They would demand payment of billions of dollars from Arab countries that expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews for the property they seized. They would demand that Jews be allowed to live in their historic homeland that they have always planned to return to. They would demand that the US stop funding a Palestinian Authority that praises terrorists and pays salaries to murderers in prison.
In order to have a true peace, there cannot be a demand for a one-sided and twisted version of "justice." That demand is completely antithetical to real peace between two parties, when each side has claims on the other that can never be reconciled.
In other words, the phrase "peace and justice" is an oxymoron in the way that it is being used by anti-Israel activists like this. They cunningly use a term with universally positive connotations, justice, and twist it to mean accepting the false narrative of only one party and the absolute defeat of the other.
There is no advertising-friendly way to expose the contradiction between what these Israel haters try to imply by using the term "peace and justice." A poster like the one pictured above goes straight into one's subconscious thought, associating peace with abandoning one side of the conflict.
Yes, a poster with smiling families and that calls for universally supported themes can be a cover for pure hate.
Similar campaigns have been answered pretty effectively with counter-campaigns that show that peace is impossible with people who raise their kids to love terror.
And Divest This! came up with a nice parody poster:
So I figured I have to join the party, with a poster showing what they are really after:
