UPDATE: Ads Against Apartheid now operates under the name Palestine Advocacy Project
This summer, donors from the US to Palestine, Hong Kong to Lebanon contributed $101,668 – above and beyond our Indiegogo fundraising target – in order to run a coordinated ads campaign in up to ten cities around the US.
Over the coming months, Ads Against Apartheid will turn this support into meaningful action by partnering with organizations and individuals who can help us maximize our impact in cities including New York, San Francisco and Washington DC.
In our biggest campaign yet, Ads Against Apartheid will use our “One Word Ads”, which show information, images, and statistics about Israeli Violence, bulldozed Palestinian houses of families made Homeless, and Stolen Palestinian land used to build Jewish-only settlements. These ads were run this June in Boston, where they were removed prior to the end of the contract by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, but not before gaining significant attention and effectively countering the messaging by racist and Islamophobic ads going up around the country.
Sami Awad, executive director of the Holy Land Trust, also serves as a member of Ads Against Apartheid’s Advisory Board. “Americans for the most part know very little about what is happening today in the Holy Land,” Awad explains. “Those who are aware wrongfully assume that this is a conflict between two equal powers. In Boston, the ‘One Word Ads’ have been a game changer in their ability to convey to Americans the devastating human rights abuses by the Israeli military and government against the Palestinian people. When these ads go national in the United States, Americans will start to understand the depth of the suffering Palestinians have endured under Israeli military occupation.”
While the upcoming campaign exposes three important aspects of Israeli apartheid, in the future, the organization will continue to lift up a variety of Palestinian narratives in order to bring about support for drastic change in US policy towards Israel and the achievement of freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians. Ads Against Apartheid is run by a small, Boston-based team of activists cultivating their expertise – from graphic design to marketing to organizing – to bring the fight for justice in Palestine to places that Americans cannot ignore.
We see our national campaign as our next major contribution to changing the mainstream discourse through exposing the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinian people, its occupation of Palestine, and its brutal system of apartheid.
Though the Indiegogo campaign has closed, those who still wish to contribute can do so on our Donate page.