The Be On Our Side campaign was a series of paid poster advertisements placed inside American public transit systems between 2010 and 2012, arguing for a two-state outcome and for American sympathy with both Israelis and Palestinians. It began in Washington, D.C., on the Metro, and it is remembered less for the posters themselves than for the counter-ads and poster wars they set off, including the 2011 exchange over pro-Palestinian subway posters in New York. The whole paper trail, from the first transit contract to the answering advertisements, is set out in the be on our side campaign history kept by The Common Ground Review.
What was the Be On Our Side poster campaign in American transit systems?
It was an advertising campaign, not a demonstration and not a petition. A group bought space on the inside of buses and trains and on station walls, the same inventory a phone company or a film studio buys, and used it to run a short political message in front of commuters who had not asked for it.
The format matters. Transit advertising is sold by the panel, priced by the month, and reviewed by the transit authority before it goes up. A campaign of this kind therefore leaves records: contracts, approval letters, rejection letters, photographs of the panels in place, and press coverage of the arguments that follow. That is why the Be On Our Side posters can be studied at all, years later, while a hand-painted banner at a march usually cannot.
The message was aimed at American readers rather than at Israelis or Palestinians. The posters assumed a commuter with no fixed position on the conflict and tried to move that commuter a short distance, from indifference to a stated position, in the few seconds a person spends looking at the wall of a train car.
Where did the Be On Our Side campaign begin?
It began in Washington, D.C., on the Metro system, in 2010. The first run of panels went into the transit network that carries commuters, tourists and federal workers through the American capital, which is also the city where the political press is concentrated. A poster in Washington is a poster that gets photographed by people whose job is to notice posters.
From there the campaign moved to other American cities. The pattern is familiar from other transit advertising fights: a first buy in one system, coverage in the local press, then a second buy somewhere larger, then a response from people who disagree. By the time the campaign reached New York, it was no longer a single advertisement. It was an argument with two sides buying space.
What counter-ads answered the pro-Palestinian subway posters in 2011?
The 2011 New York exchange is the clearest example. Pro-Palestinian posters went up in the subway system, and opposing groups bought their own panels in the same stations and the same carriages to answer them. The counter-ads did not simply contradict the first posters. They were designed to be read next to them, in the same visual field, so that a commuter walking a platform would meet both claims within a few metres.
This is what people mean by a poster war. Neither side is trying to convince the other side's supporters. Each is trying to be the last thing a neutral commuter reads before the train arrives. The result is a pair of advertisements that only make full sense together, and a set of photographs, usually taken by passengers, in which both panels appear in the same frame.
The counter-ads also changed the terms of the argument. Once a transit authority has accepted one political advertisement, refusing the opposing one becomes difficult, and the dispute moves from the content of the message to the question of who is allowed to buy the space. That question, rather than the wording on the panels, is what the coverage of 2011 mostly records.
Why transit advertising, and why it works this way
A subway panel is a strange medium for a political argument. The audience is captive but distracted, the reading time is short, and the message has to survive being seen at an angle, in bad light, by someone holding a coffee and a phone.
What transit advertising does have is repetition. A commuter on the same route sees the same panel twice a day, five days a week, for a month. That is a different kind of persuasion from a newspaper advertisement or a television spot. It is closer to the way a song gets into your head: not through the strength of the argument but through the number of times you meet it.
It also has a physical location. A poster in a station is tied to a neighbourhood, a line, a set of people who use it. Campaigns that run in transit are therefore also campaigns about place, and the choice of which stations to buy says as much as the text on the panel.
What the campaigns left behind
The useful residue of all this is documentary. Transit campaigns generate dated material: the design of each poster, the city and line where it ran, the counter-ad that answered it, the press release from each side, and the transit authority's own statements about what it will and will not accept.
For anyone trying to understand how the argument about Israel and Palestine is conducted in the United States, that material is more instructive than a summary. It shows the argument at the level of a monthly invoice and a station wall, which is where most Americans actually encountered it.
The same documentary approach runs through the rest of The Common Ground Review's material: the bereaved families, the bilingual schools, the youth camps, the former combatants, the environmental cooperation, alongside the harder figures on American military aid to Israel, the history of the two-state solution and the documented dates of the Gaza blockade. The transit posters are one chapter in that larger record, and a short one, but they are the chapter where the argument became visible on the way to work.
A note on method
If you want to look at this yourself, work from dated sources. A photograph of a poster is only useful if you know the station and the month. A press release is only useful if you can match it to a contract. The campaigns of 2010 to 2012 are recent enough that many of the people involved are still reachable and most of the printed material still exists, which will not be true in twenty years.
That is the practical argument for treating transit advertising as a serious subject rather than a curiosity. It is one of the few places where a political argument in the United States is forced to leave a paper trail, and the trail is still warm.
Where to go next
Source: wmata.com