Ad campaign tests pro-Israel group’s launch in Canada

VANCOUVER — An advertising campaign countering anti-Israel ads on Canadian buses is testing an American advocacy group as it extends its reach into Canada.

StandWithUs, a 12-year-old group based in southern California with branches across the United States and in Israel, opened its first Canadian office last December. But it was only recently that its presence was felt there. In mid-October the organization put up a series of pro-Israel advertisements on Vancouver transit after ads critical of Israel began running in September.

The full-throttle campaign ran counter the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), the Canadian standard-bearer of Israel advocacy, which initially called for a muted communal response, arguing acknowledgment would only draw more publicity.

“These kind of anti-Israel initiatives mostly don’t gain a whole lot of traction with the public and what we’re trying to avoid is giving it oxygen that it wouldn’t otherwise benefit from,” said Shimon Fogel, CIJA’s CEO.

While the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto (FSWC) and the local Jewish federation in Vancouver both ignored CIJA’s plea and spoke out forcefully in the media against the ads, when it came to the counter ads StandWithUs found scant support among the organized community.

“I honestly don’t think it’s a sufficient method,” said Avi Benlolo, CEO of FSWC. “It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction, to get their name out there and to say, ‘Look what we’re doing,’”

For StandWithUs, the decision to run a counter ad campaign was a no-brainer.

“We put up the ads because that is what we do,” said StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein. “We respond to misinformation about Israel, whether it’s on campus or in billboards or in newspapers or in film — that’s what we do.”

Rothstein said that in the United States synagogues and Jewish federations in the United States often enlist her group to help counter negative ads, something they have been doing since 2007. In contrast, Rothstein said only individuals in Vancouver asked StandWithUs for help, not any community institutions.

Furthermore, Rothstein said that if the groups behind the anti-Israel ads know that StandWithUs will respond, they will be less likely to run their negative ads in the future.

That assertion is challenged by Marty Roth, a member of the seven-member Palestine Awareness Coalition (PAC), which sponsored the “Palestinian Loss of Land” ads that have been running on Vancouver buses and in a light-rail station. Roth said the Jewish community’s outrage at the advertisements and StandWithUs’s counter ads surprised and delighted the coalition.

‘This gave us the kind of publicity we never could have dreamed of otherwise’

“As a matter of fact that was what guaranteed the success of the campaign,” Roth said. “This gave us the kind of publicity we never could have dreamed of otherwise.”

But Meryle Kates, executive director of SWU-Canada said the organization is not worried about giving more publicity to the anti-Israel ads.

“That’s not part of our thinking,” Kates said. “We responded because we know thousands of riders were learning maybe the only facts in history that they would know about Israel… and that it was all lies.”

“We’re not of the opinion that it’s okay to just ignore it — that’s a problem, to ignore it, actually.”

Fogel mentioned that another problem with running counter ads is that it leads the general population to disengage and view both sides of the conflict poorly.

The dueling ads from PAC and StandWithUs depict “Palestinian Loss of Land” and “Jewish Loss of Land” respectively. The PAC ads show an area marked “Palestine” being reduced in size from 1946 until 2012 and the text, “5 million Palestinians are classified as refugees by the UN.”

The counter ads depict the ancient Jewish kingdom dated 1000 BCE, the “Jewish homeland” under the Balfour Declaration in 1920 and the modern state of Israel with the West Bank and Golan Heights marked as “disputed territory.” (StandWithUs also ran a second ad with children waving Canadian and Israeli flags.)

Andrew Baron, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and an expert in the psychology of advertising, reviewed the dueling ads for The Times of Israel. Baron said riders unfamiliar with the conflict who saw both map advertisements would be unlikely to pick a side.

“They’re mirror opposites of one another and I think that seeing those side by side — you’re not giving people any discriminating information that will help them make an informed decision,” Baron said.

But for those riders who see only one set of advertisements or the other, Baron said their interest might genuinely be peaked due to the fact most transit ads aren’t political in nature.

“If what’s normative is, say, brand marketing and all of the sudden you get this political stuff, it’s going to increase our attention to it,” Baron said. “People are probably going to process it a lot more.”

The worry that the negative ads will bias Vancouver residents against Israel is part of what motivated StandWithUs’s to respond in kind. But other Israel advocates, like Fogel, suggest the Israeli-Palestinian conflict too far removed from transit riders’ lives for them to take heed of either side’s messaging.

“Canadians tune out,” Fogel said. “When they see these two different groups just duking it about a place in the world most haven’t visited, people don’t really have an understanding of why we would think that anything would resonate with them.”

Despite the friction between SWU-Canada and more established Canadian organizations, the fledging advocacy group isn’t slowing down.

When Kates was hired last fall, she converted a spare room of her home into a StandWithUs office. Now she said it is common to find a cluster of interns there working on laptops to plan campus activities like speaker series or movie screenings.

Currently the sole employee of SWU-Canada, Kates said the goal is to grow the organization, which is currently active mostly in Ontario, move into real offices and start opening chapters in other Canadians cities.

Canadian university campuses have been a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism over the past decade.

In 2002, then former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled speech at Concordia University in Montreal was cancelled after pro-Palestinian activists clashed with police and a riot broke out. Israeli Apartheid Week, a popular time to feature anti-Israel speakers and stage demonstrations on campuses, began in Toronto in 2005 and has since spread to cities around the world. Last March, the student union at York University in Toronto, Canada’s third-largest, voted to divest from Israel.

Kates said while other Canadian groups had been doing some campus activism, none were as focused on the cause as StandWithUs.

“There was a hole here,” Kates said. “Everybody did try to do something on campus but there wasn’t the really professional, effective kind of advocacy that StandWithUs is doing anywhere here.”

But while Kates and StandWithUs CEO Rothstein point toward anti-Israel transit campaigns like the one in Vancouver and an uptick in divestment activities on campus, not everyone agrees that SWU-Canada is especially needed in the country.

Wiesenthal’s Benlolo said the Jewish community in Toronto, where a pro-Palestinian group attempted to run ads before being rejected by the transit agency, was able to take a StandWithUs-style approach to activism, but chose not to.

“I’m happy to put up a picture of a bombed out bus caused by suicide bombers in Israel,” Benlolo said. “But I would prefer that not happen — that this type of advertising and incitement just doesn’t happen. That’s my preference.”

‘I’m happy to put up a picture of a bombed out bus caused by suicide bombers in Israel, but I would prefer that not happen’

Toward that end, Benlolo said he invested time and resources in lobbying local politicians, the Toronto transit commission and advertising companies to make the pro-Israel Jewish community’s feelings known behind closed doors, rather than confronting anti-Israel activism on the streets.

Likewise, while Fogel said he wholeheartedly believed in StandWithUs’s sincerity, he said the current pro-Israel activism in Canada is achieving its goals. To continue that efficacy Fogel said it’s important to make sure passion doesn’t throw that advocacy off course.

“Some organizations feel that it’s useful to tap into the kind of visceral emotional attachment that people have to Israel,” Fogel said.

But, he added, “The stakes are so high that we have a compelling obligation to undertake an approach focused entirely on achieving increased support for Israel — even if it doesn’t provide the same emotional outlet for people to give expression to their frustrations about the activities of our adversaries.”

Kates, rejected accusations that StandWithUs might be overly brash and said she was proud of harnessing the passion Canadians have for Israel.

“I hope we’re thought of as being front and center. I really do,” she said.

“We’re not the ones on campus talking about taking back land, or the history of Jerusalem one hundred years ago — so if strident is the label people in other organizations want to give us that’s unfortunate. Nonetheless, we all do good work and we do it in different ways.”

Despite disagreement over tactics and approach, there seems to be wide agreement that even in Canada — where the government has proven itself to be on Israel’s staunchest allies in recent years — support for the country will fade if the pro-Israel community doesn’t keep advocating.

“It’s like McDonald’s. Every week that McDonald’s doesn’t advertise they lose market share, and I think our efforts have to be continuous, sustained and at a high-level,” Fogel said. “We’re anxious and only too happy to work with any group that’s supportive of Israel if we think our collective efforts can advance our agenda.”