Dubai: A series of pro-Palestinian advertisements campaign was placed recently in Boston’s downtown State Street Station, which is used by an estimated 13,000 riders a day.
The “One Word” campaign was launched on June 8 by Ads Against Apartheid (AAA), which is a local Boston-based non-profit group, and is scheduled to run throughout June.
Three separate posters are running side by side. They read “Homeless”, “Stolen” and “Violence”.
While the first highlights the number of Palestinian homes destroyed by Israel – more than 25,000 homes, the second focuses on the 150 Jewish-only cities that Israel built on internationally-recognised Palestinian land, in reference to the colonies. The third ad has a picture of a young girl with the following sentence: “Israel has killed one Palestinian child every 4 days since 2000”.
“If the ads are shocking, that’s because the reality on the ground is shocking,” said Cahdi Salamoun, president of Ads Against Apartheid in a statement posted on the group’s website on the campaign.
“American tax dollars help the Israeli government maintain a brutal military occupation, which has denied the Palestinian people their basic rights for decades. These ads show what Israel’s occupation and apartheid really look like,” commented Richard Colbath-Hess, co-founder of Ads Against Apartheid and a Jewish-American faculty member at the University of Massachusetts.
The ads, to many, come as part of the freedom of expression guaranteed in the US constitution.
“It is not a strange thing for the American scene to have even Jewish organisations that are against the Israeli policies against the Palestinian people,” commented Mohammad Ghuneim, a veteran Arab-American journalist, to Gulf News on the ads.
Ads Against Apartheid is planning to expand its campaign to other cities across the Unites Sates. It expressed hope on its website to gain the support from sympathetic member of the community.
“Each donation will be matched dollar for dollar towards Ads Against Apartheid’s Autumn Campaign, with a total matching limit of $4,000.”
“Only a well-informed citizenry can steer US policy in Israel/Palestine away from its current destructive path, led by special interests, into a more healthy and constructive direction,” the group said in explaining its mission online.
