Freedom of the Press in the Middle East? Only in Israel.

There is something almost refreshing about an ad campaign active in the Bay Area right now, one specimen of which is before me at the moment on a BART train. I just walked over, laptop in hand, and typed the text of the ad verbatim.

Freedom of the Press in the Middle East? Only in Israel.
Of the 19 Middle Eastern and North African countries rated by Freedom House’s recent press freedom survey, only one, Israel is rated free. Israeli media, in both Hebrew and Arabic, can freely criticize the head of government without fear.
In many surrounding Arab and Muslim states, journalists can be arrested and imprisoned, and media can be shut down for voicing criticism of government leaders and their policies.

What I find refreshing is the campaign’s unabashed sense of propaganda. No effort is made to hide it. The ad announces itself with a sticker (I had recalled previous sightings as unattributed — perhaps someone complained?) as sponsored by something called “blueStar PR: The Jewish Ink Tank www.bluestarpr.com.” But to whom is it targeted? Who do the Jewish Ink Tank think I am; what do they think I think?

The ad: We see two young men, one possible Jew and the other probable Arab, vaguely ethnic, in front of a falafel stand. They are each holding newspapers, and — interestingly — the man I initially identified as Jewish is reading a newspaper in Arabic, and the man I identified as Arab holds one in Hebrew, although he gazes thoughtfully, imploringly even, at the camera. Behind them, a third man orders a falafel. The type design is poor and unremarkable. This campaign is not exactly well done… [Update: I found this on their site.

I had previously seen another ad, at a Muni 24 line bus shelter near the Castro (the 24 runs up Castro street; this is unambiguously a shelter ad targeted to a heavily gay audience). This former ad had a surprisingly similar picture, but the caption said something like “Gay Rights in the Middle East? Only in Israel.” I don’t remember the details of the small copy.

I am trying to decide how concerned I am about this campaign. It comes off as kind of cloying, first of all. The ad is obviously marked by a deafening silence on the question of Palestine. It attempts to structure the debate about Israel as a debate about rights offered by states. Israel, we learn, offers a better package of rights than “many surrounding Arab and Muslim states.” The ad gives a magazine rating: Freedom House (who the hell are they?) apparently offers Consumer Reports-style ratings of such things; Israel’s press freedoms are found best-in-class. I’m sure they’ll win a fucking JD Power and Associates award.

Even if Israel is the sole representative of the values of the European Enlightenment in the Middle East (and I don’t doubt it), this is not what is at question in any sane debate about the Israeli-Palestinean question. In the real world, the issue with Israel is not one of its comparison to other neighboring states. Our concerns are about one particular group of people who do not receive protections from any adequate state. It would be nice if they could; only at that point would it start making any sense at all to discuss things in this way. Surely it is hard to deny that Israel is one of the impediments to a proper Palestinian state. In all seriousness, talk about rights doesn’t really do the job here; it merely obscures the issue. The problem is that one group does not have anything approaching a viable state of their own, and as long as this remains the case, it is unlikely that the other state will be able to secure theirs in any real sense. I do not think this is a mischaracterization of the situation.

But more on these ads. What are we to make of the linguistic crossing in the choice of newspapers? Is it merely me misreading the ethnic codes? It might be. Are they deliberately blurred? Or is the point (most likely) to suggest a shared public sphere between the two ethnico-linguistic communities? Which raises the question of the falafel, which seems to be a metonym for a more profound shared culture within the Middle East. I suppose this effacement of ethnic/cultural boundaries produces the showroom in which we can comparison-shop for States. It is only from within the nationalist imaginary of discernible ethnic groups that we can even identify the Palestinians at all.

Perhaps later I will do a similar analysis of a shelter advertisement (seen on 24th Street and Folsom or so in the Mission) by “AdCouncil and the US Army” that touts the (recently-challenged) educational benefits of enlistment. It offers a saccharine message to the effect of: “When I make it, a piece of my mom makes it too…” or something like that, over an image of a smiling mortar-boarded black man at a college graduation. This is much more straightforward, an interpellative hailing in the classic “Uncle Sam Wants You” mold — except that it proposes the affiliation as scholarly not soldierly.