Activism

Backer of NY ads exposing Palestinian land-loss says response has been ‘astounding’ and news ‘coverage is pouring in’

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Henry Clifford’s advertisement at the Chappaqua Metro-North train station July 10, 2012.
(Photo: Seth Harrison / The Journal News )

Last night I talked to Henry Clifford, the 83-year-old Connecticut man who paid for the smashing ads on New York commuter train platforms that describe the dispossession of Palestinian lands over the last century.

“I’ve been plowing this field for many years and I am absolutely astounded by the response I’ve received, and the news coverage,” the former financier said. “We’ve been begging for coverage for years. Now it’s pouring in.”

He said he had been interviewed by CBS, Fox News, NBC and many radio stations, and the questions were fair ones.

“I have received nothing but positive responses with two exceptions [by email],” said Clifford, whose email address hcliffordws@aol.com, is on the ads. “This has produced an overwhelming response.”

Over the years Clifford and his group Committee for Peace and Palestine have run ads and written countless letters to newspapers with nothing like this impact, he said. It never got covered. Last year he put up billboards in New Haven and Old Saybrook, CT, asking Americans about the $30 billion in aid pledged to Israel over ten years, “Can we afford this?”

“The response was really pitiful,” he said.

The commuter platform ads seem to have struck a nerve, he said, because they are in the heart of New York’s media zone, viewed by movers and shakers, the affluent and the educated.

There have already been threats to take the ads down, he said. A Brooklyn religious Jewish group went to the MTA to demand that the ads be pulled. “To their everlasting credit, they said, These ads were brought to us by CBS Outdoor, a reputable company. They screened them, they approved them. It is not our job to censor them.”

But CBS Outdoor folded on less-provocative billboards put up around Los Angeles a month back, and tore them down. What’s to stop these ads from being ripped down?

“They can’t. I have a contract. The ads are there and have been paid for. I can take legal action if they fail to abide by the contract.”

I said the success of the ads indicates a shift in public opinion. Clifford said he wasn’t sure about that. “I really don’t see that the American people are any better informed than they were a year ago about this matter. There is a great amount of lack of knowledge, misinformation and even lack of interest. They think, ‘Oh it’s a mess over there,’ and then they yawn. We are trying to spread the word.”

Clifford’s Committee for Peace and Palestine has tried to stir a change in US policy for over ten years.

I asked him about the charge that the ads are anti-Semitic.

“My response is that maps are historically and geographically the truth. You cannot make a map anti-Semitic. Either it’s accurate or inaccurate. Those who disapprove of these ads, if they want to show they’re inaccurate, they should bring that proof forward.”

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You know, given my belief that Israel is already consciously into its own One-State solution and will now just be increasing its ethnic cleansing techniques, and given that this will only continue to be recognized more and more and the sort of maps that we’ve now seen here create such an understanding and resonance with people, I wonder if the ultimate effect is going to be quite unlike what lots of people think.

For instance Walt and J-Street and etc. all talk about a One-State solution being a disaster for Israel because of the opprobrium it will bring down on its head materially. But I don’t think Israel cares about that and believes—with good reason—that it will weather same just fine just as it has weathered having no peace but having all that Palestinian land for all these years, and that it will be easily able to keep the money flowing from Uncle Sucker U.S.A. to handle the outrage that stems from such ethnic cleansing.

In light of the resonance such maps will have then, I wonder, when that ethnic cleansing has progressed far enough, if there isn’t going to be a fundamental and radical readjustment of the world’s image of jews and jewry in general instead. (Unfortunately, but not exactly helped by Israel’s constant demand that it be viewed as “the state of the jewish people.”)

That is, a readjustment from the present instinctive image of jews as being innocent victims—especially of the Holocaust—to a view of jews and jewry instead being ethno-racial *aggressors.* Indeed, perhaps even as to the Holocaust, aggressors who were just in a state of war with the ethnic Germans and so were just simply losers in that war rather than innocent non-combatants.

Nothing imminent obviously, but what’s going to be the story after the ethnic cleansings become more and more open and apparent and brutal, and the last map in any series effectively shows only a sprinkling of Palestinians left?

And thus, the damage coming from all this falling not on Israelis really, but instead on Diaspora jews really?

The problem with the maps isn’t that they’re antisemitic. It’s that they’re factually false. The earliest looks at property owned by individual Jews, without asking what property was owned by individual Palestinians. The next looks at a line drawn by the United Nations, accepted by the Yishuv but violently rejected by the entire Arab world. The third tells of a limited agreement between nations, defined at the time by the Arab states as temporary. The fourth also tells of a temporary agreement, for the first time in the series one of them being Palestinian, and carefully omits Areas B & C, an essential part of that agreement, implying falsely that they are controlled by Israel in the same way as inside the Green Line.

For the consecutive ones to be comparable with the first, it would have to show privately owned land of both ethnic groups, irrespective of citizenship, at all stages – or, perhaps, political control at all stages. Were it to do either, the graphic would be very different… but that’s the point. The creator of the map wasn’t interested in history, facts, intellectual coherence. He or she was interested in making a propaganda point.

What a great man. Total admiration for him. Thanks for bringing it to our attention Phil.

>> You cannot make a map anti-Semitic.

Mr. Clifford underestimates the determination of Zio-supremacists. One might almost think he is anti-Semitic… ;-)

This whole thing about maps being anti-Semitic seems to mean as if Israel is a religion and God the whole world must worship, and if you criticize Israel then you are of the damned. This is kind of a dictatorial premise, and it doesn’t work. The more you suppress such things, the more people eventually rebel whether they’re Jews or gentiles. They get super annoyed and plenty of young Jews are not afraid to confront right wing Zionists in a vociferous way from my own experience and tell them to get lost. The scare tactics won’t work so well anymore.