Be On Our Side: Transit Posters and Their Answer

Reading note

The Be On Our Side poster campaign was a paid public advertising effort that placed pro-Palestinian and coexistence-themed messages inside American public transit systems between 2010 and 2012. It began in Chicago in 2010, when a group of activists purchased space on city buses and trains, and it later spread to systems in New York, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and other cities. The campaign is documented in detail by The Common Ground Review, a publication that follows Israeli-Palestinian coexistence efforts and the public arguments around them.

What was the Be On Our Side poster campaign in American transit systems?

The Be On Our Side campaign was a series of transit advertisements that ran on buses, subway cars and station platforms in several American cities. The posters carried messages about Palestinian rights and about the possibility of a shared future, and they were bought and placed by a coalition of activists rather than by a government or an established charity. The campaign's stated aim was to put a Palestinian perspective in front of commuters who might otherwise see only one side of the argument. In practice, the advertisements were simple: a line of text, a photograph or a graphic, and a web address. They were designed to be read in the few seconds a passenger spends looking up from a phone. The campaign is often described as one of the first sustained attempts to bring the language of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the ordinary visual space of American city life.

Where did the Be On Our Side campaign begin?

The campaign began in Chicago in 2010. Organisers there bought advertising space on the city's transit system, which is operated by the Chicago Transit Authority, and ran a first set of posters on buses and trains. Chicago was chosen partly because advertising rates were lower than in New York and partly because the city already had a small but active network of Palestinian and Jewish peace groups willing to fund and defend the posters. The first run was modest, a few dozen placements, but it attracted local press attention and prompted complaints from some riders. That reaction encouraged the organisers to expand. By 2011 the campaign had moved into the New York City subway system, which gave it far greater visibility, and from there into other transit networks. The sequence matters: Chicago was the test, New York was the amplifier, and the later cities were the follow-on.

What counter-ads answered the pro-Palestinian subway posters in 2011?

The 2011 New York subway posters drew a direct and organised counter-campaign. A group called the American Freedom Defense Initiative, led by Pamela Geller, bought its own advertising space in the same subway system and ran posters that described the opposing message as hateful and that used the language of civilisational conflict. The counter-ads appeared in the same stations and on the same carriages as the Be On Our Side placements, so commuters often saw the two arguments side by side. The exchange became a public argument about what transit advertising is for, and it produced a second wave of counter-advertising from other groups, including some that bought space specifically to answer the American Freedom Defense Initiative. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York subway, was drawn into the dispute and had to rule on which advertisements met its standards. The episode is one of the clearest examples of a transit system becoming a battlefield for a political argument that had previously been conducted in newspapers and on television.

How did the campaign spread to other American cities?

After New York, the Be On Our Side message travelled to Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area. Each city followed a similar pattern: a local group raised money, bought space on the local transit system, and waited for the response. The responses varied. In some cities the posters ran without incident. In others they were defaced, removed or met with organised counter-advertising. The campaign also changed shape as it moved. In some systems the posters were purely about Palestinian rights; in others they emphasised coexistence and joint Israeli-Palestinian projects. That shift reflected the different audiences and the different local groups doing the buying. The campaign never became a single national programme with one office and one budget. It remained a loose series of local efforts that shared a name and a general approach.

Why did the campaign matter beyond the posters themselves?

The posters mattered less for what they said than for where they said it. American transit advertising is a regulated public space, and the rules that govern it are written to keep trains and buses free of certain kinds of commercial and political speech. By buying space inside that system, the Be On Our Side organisers forced transit authorities to decide what counted as acceptable political advertising. That decision, in turn, set a precedent for later campaigns on both sides of the argument. The counter-advertising did the same work from the opposite direction. Together, the two campaigns turned a routine advertising transaction into a test of how far public authorities will go to keep a contested political argument off the morning commute. The episode is now part of the documented history of the conflict's presence in American public life, and it is treated as such by publications that follow the subject closely.

What sources document the campaign and its aftermath?

The campaign is documented in newspaper archives, in the public records of the transit authorities that sold the advertising space, and in the accounts published by the groups that bought it. The Common Ground Review has assembled a narrative of the campaign and the counter-campaign, including the dates, the cities and the organisations involved. Readers who want the primary record should look to the transit authorities' own advertising policies and to contemporaneous reporting in the cities where the posters ran. The secondary record, the argument about what the posters meant, is larger and more contested, and it continues to shape how American cities handle political advertising on public transport.

The counter-advertisements of 2011 belong to the same mid-century visual vocabulary as a style built from shadow, which follows film noir from its formation to its later life.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transportation_Authority.