By Cindy Mindell

HARTFORD—Some have spotted it already. And, over the next three years, there’s a good chance that even more residents of Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford will catch sight of ad on the back of Connecticut Transit buses, alleging that Israel has been “stolen” from Palestinians.

The ad is funded by Henry Clifford, an octogenarian Essex resident and co-chair of an anti-Israel group called the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine (COPIP) who has purchased a three-year contract with Connecticut Transit. (COPIP is also linked to the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine.)

In 2012, Clifford funded similar ads at MetroNorth train stations in Westchester County and in the New York Times, portraying “Palestinian Loss of Land – 1946 to 2010” and four containing four maps of Israel with diminishing “Palestinian land.”

Clifford’s current Connecticut Transit bus ad campaign – his first in the state – includes two maps of Israel, from 1947 and 2010. The first delineates most of the area as “Palestinian land,” with tiny spots of “Jewish settlements.” The second includes small zones of “Palestinian land” and the majority of “Israeli & controlled land.”

The maps’ message is underscored by a UN statistic classifying 4.7 million Palestinians as refugees, accompanied by a photo of a young child (thought to actually be a refugee from the current Syrian civil war) and a quote attributed to “Israel’s first prime minister” – presumably David Ben-Gurion — saying: “We will abolish partition and spread throughout Palestine.” The reader of the ad is urged to contact elected officials and to email Clifford.

The Connecticut campaign is just one in a string of public ads promoting anti-Israel initiatives and narratives mounted throughout the country. Some posters go so far as to accuse Israel of committing war crimes and engaging in ethnic cleansing. According to a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Misleading the Public: The Spread of Anti-Israel Campaigns,” since 2012, there have been more than 20 major campaigns in dozens of U.S. cities. The messages – on billboards, public transportation vehicles and station walls, and newspaper pages – not only distort historical facts, but include calls to end U.S. financial and military aid to Israel and suggest that Americans are complicit in alleged Israeli human-rights violations.

“While many established anti-Israel groups use public spaces to get their messages across, there are groups that have been formed for the sole purpose of bringing anti-Israel ad campaigns to as many U.S. cities as possible,” according to the report. “These campaigns often receive additional funding and support from local anti-Israel groups that also work to promote the campaigns within their communities.”

Clifford’s ads began showing up on some Connecticut Transit buses in Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford in October. By the end of the year, the offices of the Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut (JFACT) and ADL Connecticut Region had received numerous concerned phone calls and emails.

In response, ADL Connecticut Region director Steve Ginsburg published an op-ed in the New Haven Register on Feb. 14, “Misleading anti-Israel bus ads in Connecticut.”

“We felt we had a responsibility to frame the debate for everybody, explain why the ads are incorrect, but also explain why they’re legal,” says Andy Friedland, assistant director of the ADL Connecticut Region. “We wanted to get that whole debate into a more proper forum – off the back of a bus and into a place where people can actually have conversations. We also wanted to make the point that Israel has free speech much like we do here, and point out some of the easy comparisons and contrasts between America and Israel and the rest of the Middle East.”

In his op-ed, Ginsburg writes “To be clear, we take great issue with the ads, and find their grossly inaccurate claims and lack of context to be highly disturbing. None of the ads mention the Arab rejection of 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have led to the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab/Palestinian. One ad contains a quote about Israel being spread throughout Palestine, language intended to suggest that Israel’s very existence is illegitimate. And it makes no mention of the repeated Palestinian rejection of peace offers made by Israel during the past two decades, which would have included the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and in upwards of 95 percent of the West Bank.”

But, Ginsburg writes, ADL defends Clifford’s free speech:

“Though it might seem like a quick fix to call for removal of the ads on the basis of their misleading nature, to do so would run counter to what the Anti-Defamation League stands for as an organization, and what we stand for as a country. We have never been in the business of suppressing speech, even when we disagree with it. When faced with messages we find to be false or misleading, we believe the answer is more speech, not less. We are thankful to live in a robustly democratic country where speech is not suppressed by our government and the citizens of Connecticut can research and disprove spurious claims instead of banning them.”

Whether the ADL should support limits on public transportation advertising was the topic of the 2015 Civil Rights Policy Debate hosted by the ADL Mountain States Civil Rights Committee, held in October. The issue was again debated at the ADL’s Annual Meeting of the National Commission later that month. As a matter of national policy, ADL does not support limiting First Amendment-protected speech in public venues.

“Even if something is antisemitic, it doesn’t mean that it should be censored,” says Ginsburg. “ADL is going to try to combat hate speech at every turn and we’re not going to be friends with people who are saying those things, but the U.S. legal interpretations of the First Amendment are very broad, much broader than they are in Europe, for example, where they don’t have a First Amendment and they regulate speech much more than we do here. [Free speech] is part of something that we love but also part of something that brings costs.”

The Register published several letters to the editor in response to the op-ed, including one from Clifford and three of the letter-writers were members of PRIMER-Connecticut, Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting.

In an email to the Ledger, PRIMER president emeritus Alan Stein dismantle the accuracy of the ad’s claims: “What Ben Gurion said was almost the opposite of what Clifford put in his ad… [and] was investigated by CAMERA [Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America] several years ago.” [See “p. 7 for the full text of Ben Gurion’s remarks.]

Stein says that the portion of the ad claiming Israel controls 62 percent of the West Bank is “basically correct, but still highly misleading because roughly 95% of the Arabs who live in the disputed territories live in the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. So while Israel controls territory, the Arab people are controlled by their own government.”

The ad’s claim that the UN classifies millions of Palestinian Arabs as refugees is true, but at best misleading, says Stein. There were approximately 600,000 Palestinians who became refugees in 1948. With the youngest of these refugees now 68, it is reasonable to estimate that those still alive number in the tens of thousands, not the millions.

“All the rest are descendants of refugees,” notes Stein. “But the UN uses a different definition of refugee when it comes to Palestinian Arabs, and that’s the real tragedy. UNRWA has prevented those descendants of refugees from living normal lives, and is rather making them live as if they were refugees.”

Calling the bus map, “totally absurd,” Stein says, “The 1947 version paints every spot that wasn’t heavily Jewish at that time green, but most of the area was sparsely populated. The 2010 version does something more distorting than the reverse. It only puts green on the portions of the disputed territories that are virtually judenrein, while painting everything else, including the portion of Israel inside the Green Line which are overwhelmingly Arab, white. Many places on both sides of the Green Line are sparsely populated, including much if not most of Area C [a portion of the West Bank].”

This isn’t the first time the maps used in Cliffords bus ad have been proven false or at best misleading, notes Ronald Kiener, a professor of religion at Trinity College in Hartford and director of the school’s Jewish Studies program.

“The maps which purport to show the theft of Palestine have recently also come up in a textbook that is distributed by McGraw Hill entitled Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World. Just this week, after historical inaccuracies were brought to the attention of the publisher, McGraw Hill announced that it is pulling the book from distribution and destroying all copies,” reports Kiener, who is also a member of the Ledger Editorial Advisory Board.

Likewise, he notes, cable TV’s MSNBC apologized for broadcasting the erroneous and misleading maps this past October.

In that incident, MSNBC host Kate Snow acknowledged that the maps gave the impression that Palestinians had control over all of modern-day Israel and have continuously lost land since. One of the maps showed the West Bank and Gaza as controlled by the Palestinians from 1949 to 1967, when the regions were actually controlled by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.

“[I]n an attempt to talk about the context for the current turmoil in the Middle East, we showed a series of maps of the changing geography in that region,” Snow said. “We realized after we went off the air the maps were not factually accurate and we regret using them.”

However, the legality of the ad is a different issue.

The question of whether the ads are legal is linked to the question of whether they can be defined as hate speech, “expression intended to degrade a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, etc.,” says Friedland. “However horrible it is, hate speech is still protected by the First Amendment. That’s why ADL is hesitant to talk about something being ‘hate speech’ because then people say that it is not protected and should be banned.”

To be considered “hate speech,” communication must directly incite readers or listeners to violent action. The bus ads do not fit this definition, according to Ginsburg.

“I would say that the bus ads are anti-Israel and promote an unfair reporting of what the actual situation is,” he says. “There’s also [political activist] Pamela Geller, who does horrible, anti-Muslim bus ads and we don’t go to the bus company and say, ‘Don’t let those ads run on the buses.’ ADL takes a pretty broad civil-rights and First-Amendment approach on this issue, because we think that, in the long run, stifling speech is not going to help; it’s going to hurt. Especially in these cases, where, the minute we get the bus ads taken down, Henry Clifford tells the world, ‘the Jewish organizations are stifling my speech and abridging my free speech.’”

The ADL Connecticut Regional office has received emails and calls, both supporting the Register piece and criticizing Ginsburg for not going far enough.

“Some people say, ‘You should definitely be calling for the removal of those ads: they’re antisemitic, they’re lies,’ and then we get criticism from the other side, who thinks we’re Likud operatives who are trying to fund bombs for schools,” Friedland says.

The op-ed has garnered less-than-civil responses on ADL Connecticut’s Facebook page.

“It’s quite telling how split down the middle the responses are, where half of the people are furious with us from one side and half are furious with us from the other side,” Friedland says. “That’s what we hang our hat on at ADL: we’re the center and try to take a reasonable response that sees both sides of the issue” – within the framework of the American legal system.

“Some people are saying that we should contact the bus company and get them to take the ads down, but we’re not doing that,” Ginsburg says. “ADL is monitoring COPIP, but we’re not trying to muzzle them and we’re not going to be running counter-ads. We’re working with other groups like StandWithUs, which has a lot of information on this issue and has done counter-bus ad campaigns. JFACT [Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut] has reached out to get information about the ads and is monitoring this issue. But none of the groups that I’ve talked to have tried to take action to get the ads taken down.”

ADL’s philosophy is endorsed by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Greater New Haven, the public-affairs arm of the Jewish Federation.

“I think Steve Ginsburg’s ADL op-ed covered all the bases I would,” says JCRC director, Rabbi Joshua Ratner. “As he said, the ads are factually wrong and grossly misrepresentative of a complex context, but they are not hate speech. The proper American response is through a vigorous presentation of accurate facts, not to try to suppress misinformation.”

Asked for comment, JCRC of Greater Hartford director Laura Zimmerman deferred to Bob Fishman, executive director of the Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut. When Fishman approached Connecticut Transit about the ads, “they told me that this is the longest contract they’ve ever had, as well as the first political-type ad they’ve ever had,” he says. “They saw that it was controversial and they turned to the Connecticut Department of Transportation attorneys, who study these types of ads around the country, including on buses. The attorneys told Connecticut Transit that the ads [fall under] freedom of speech and that the bus company cannot deny [Clifford] permission to run the ads.”

As for next steps, Friedland says: “We’re not trying to get into a back-and-forth that could never end,” says Friedland. “We expressed publicly how we feel about the ad; we got responses: Henry Clifford published a letter to the editor in response, and many people wrote in and responded to his response. This could continue, if that was something we were interested in doing, but I think it loses efficacy at some point. We could write an op-ed every day and use our budget to put up counter-ads but, at the end of the day, whose mind is that changing and what good is it doing?”

Instead, ADL’s mission is to serve as a source of information and fact-checking. “Our general approach is education through actually sitting and talking with people – both in the media and face to face,” Ginsburg says. “Through the methodology of our broad-based anti-bullying and anti-bias programs that we do in schools, we talk with Jewish students and parents about how, when they see stuff that seems to be unfairly portraying Israel, they can be a voice in their community, at their school, on their college campus. We’re doing outreach to other groups – churches, mosques, Muslim groups – and building those relationships that enable us to have a conversation about the Israel-Palestine issue. But it’s a much slower approach; it’s more about big media and local education, as opposed to billboards and posters.”

CAP: The ad now appearing on CT buses

He said what?

As per the bus ad now on Connecticut roadways, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, is credited with stating: We will abolish partition and spread throughout Palestine.” Did Ben-Gurion really say that? History shows that taken out of context the statement is a distortion of what the prime minister actually said. In his article “Falsifying the Record: Benny Morris, David Ben-Gurion and the ’Transfer’ Idea” (Israel Affairs, V4, No. 2, Winter 1997, pp 52-53), Efraim Karsh provided the full and correct quote:

Mr. Ben-Gurion: The starting point for a solution of the question of the Arabs in the Jewish State is, in his view, the need to prepare the ground for an Arab-Jewish agreement; he supports [the establishment of] the Jewish State [on a small part of Palestine], not because he is satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we constitute a large force following the establishment of the state – we will cancel the partition [of the country between Jews and Arabs] and we will expand throughout the Land of Israel.

Mr. Shapira [a JAE member]: By force as well?

Mr. Ben-Gurion: [No]. Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement. So long as we are weak and few the Arabs have neither the need nor the interest to conclude an alliance with us… And since the state is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it must prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement – we are obliged to run the state in such a way that will win us the friendship of the Arabs both within and outside the state.