The Israel Tourist Office is to remove posters at London Underground stations after complaints that a map showed the Occupied Territories incorporated into Israel.
May 21, 2009 16:08ByJan Shure, Jan Shure
The Israel Government Tourist Office has decided to remove a series of posters at London Underground stations after a complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority about a map featured in the poster which shows the Occupied Territories incorporated in Israel.
As reported in this week’s JC, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign complained to the ASA about the posters, which are part of the IGTO’s Think.Israel campaign.
The ASA is to investigate the complaint, and expects to have an adjudication within the next few weeks.
Both the PSC and Dan Judelson of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJP) also wrote to complain to CBS Outdoor, which is responsible for the poster sites, and to Transport for London (TfL) to complain about the poster.
However, before any decision could be made by CBS or TfL, the IGTO decided to pull the poster from the sites.
The poster was due to go up on 150 sites across the London Underground, and that just 108 have so far gone up. The IGTO is investigating the possibility of producing a new poster – without the contentious map – to replace the existing one, and using the new poster on the 42 sites where the poster has not yet been displayed.
In March 2007, a similar complaint was made to the ASA after an IGTO advertisement in the Radio Times used a map of Israel that showed Qumran, which is in the West Bank . At the time, the ASA’s adjudication included a “concern” that the IGTO failed to respond to the complaint.
In last week’s letter to the ASA, the PSC, criticises the IGTO poster for its use of a map “which portrays Israel as incorporating the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights ”.
The letter calls on the ASA to “take action to have the posters removed as soon as possible”, and declared: “We are disappointed that ThinkIsrael.com is again indulging in the insidious propagation of misinformation. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign finds it astonishing that these posters are being displayed when the ASA has already upheld a previous complaint against ThinkIsrael.com for using a similarly misleading map.”
But Pini Shani, deputy director of overseas marketing at Israel ’s Ministry of Tourism in Jerusalem , believes the issue has been unnecessarily politicised. “We don’t see it as a big mistake. We could have made the map two colours, showing Israel and the Occupied Territories in different shades, but this is a poster designed to encourage tourists to visit Israel . If they want to visit the West Bank as well, we would be delighted, and we hope the citizens of the West Bank benefit.”
A spokesperson for the Tourism Ministry said the total cost of the poster campaign was £40,000.
Longwood Holidays is named on the poster as the operator for Israel holidays, but Longwood’s Rafi Caplin said the firm had nothing to do with the design or content of the poster, and did not contribute financially. “We saw the ad, and we checked it, but only from the point of view of ensuring it didn’t say anything that couldn’t be offered.”