Our friend Patrick in British Columbia writes:
These pictures are of competing billboard signs found on Hwy 17 near Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This road leads between Victoria (the provincial capital) and the ferry to Vancouver. These signs would be seen by thousands of people every day in southbound lanes. The billboard for BDS– boycott, divestment and sanctions– went up earlier this year. In response, the ‘I love Israel’ appeared sometime later (perhaps a couple of months later). It was placed, no doubt deliberately, just ahead of the BDS sign.
The contrast between the two signs seems to me both striking and telling. The BDS sign points to a hard objective reality, that of occupation and oppression. It asks onlookers to boycott Israeli goods, and the group behind the sign identifies itself. The attempt to counter this offers nothing more than an emotional attachment. There’s no attempt to present a counter-reality to the one depicted in the BDS sign, and no attempt to somehow defend or justify Israeli actions. All that the person or group responsible for the sign says to us is that they love Israel. To counter the objective reality depicted of the BDS campaign, it offers the viewer the purely subjective reality of some anonymous group or person.
Somebody should put up a sign asking the Israeli lovers to put a sign showing a map of the Israel they love.
Thanks for this post~ you’re exactly right, Patrick.
Sadly, the emotional plea to love an oppressive, colonialist, expansionist and religion-supremacist “Jewish State” is likely more effective than the factual plea to support justice, accountability and equality.
I suspect that if you asked an expert in advertising they might say that the “I ❤ Israel” sign actually increases the effectiveness of the “End Israel’s Apartheid & Occupation” sign (for reasons that I will not go into except to say that an incumbent politician always tries to avoid debating a challenger*)! ! !
* SIMILARLY: ● Dueling Tennessee billboards support, oppose Christmas – http://national.deseretnews.com/article/2953/dueling-tennessee-billboards-support-oppose-christmas.html
I prefer to read the signs as complementary. I love Israel and I want it to be a country with equal rights for all its citizens (including returned refugees), at home in the Middle East, at peace with its neighbours.