Palestinian and American peace activists launched an unprecedented television campaign to dispel the negative Palestinian image among the US public. Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington A long-standing taboo in popular local American cable television networks was broken this week. A pro-Palestinian group aired for the first time a number of short, sharp, catchy and extremely moving 15-second advertisements seeking to deliver a simple message to a largely pro-Israeli American public: Palestinians are human beings too. Shortly after the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada started more than three years ago, prominent Jewish-American organisations, known for their strong support for the Likud Party, funded a television campaign emphasising the suffering of Israeli civilians due to "Palestinian terror". Portraying average, kind-looking Israeli mothers who lost their children in Palestinian attacks while stating that all that Israelis wanted was to live in peace, the adverstisments disregarded the suffering of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and asked Americans to continue supporting Israel. On Monday 19 April, the first in a series of advertisements was launched on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, MTV, The History Channel, Black Entertainment TV and several local stations. Imagine-Life -- mainly made up of young Americans of Palestinian origin supported by several pro-peace American and Jewish-American organisations -- spent months preparing for the campaign, carefully working on the message they wanted to deliver, and even more so on how to deliver it without giving influential pro-Israel organisations cause to protest and kill the project altogether. The campaign is planned to go on for six months with organisers hoping to raise more funds in order to prolong airtime. Janienah Shaouri Ghanam of Imagine-Life said that the unprecedented awareness campaign aimed at "reaching average Americans who do not know much about the conflict". Thus the logo that precedes each of the six advertisements reads "Occupation 101". The campaign highlights the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, mainly focussing on the cases of children, Palestinian Christians and average citizens who are not involved in the conflict. One advertisement refers to the Israeli pilots and soldiers who have publicly announced their opposition to the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and the excessive force they are ordered to deploy by superiors. Israeli Refuser Solidarity Network is among the various pro-peace groups backing the awareness campaign on US television networks. Other groups include Remember These Children, Jewish Voice for Peace and the Holy Land Christian Society. "We wish to convey to the American public that most people want to have a normal life without checkpoints and daily killing," said Hanna Hanania, another member of Imagine-Life. Nadine Wahab, who moved from New York to Washington to help in the production of the advertisements, said these topics were carefully chosen "as we have to concede that many Americans do not know what occupation means, or that there are Christians in Palestine, or that there are people inside Israel itself who oppose occupation and support Palestinian rights". Seeking to deliver their message in the most moderate and human way, the advertisements do not include any bloody scenes, or images of the depressing daily funerals of Palestinian martyrs or of Israeli soldiers brutally suppressing Palestinians. On the contrary, even in the adverstisment where a narrator reads parts of a letter written by American peace activist Rachel Corrie on the terrible conditions in the densely populated Gaza Strip, there is no mention of the fact that the body of the brave young woman was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer a year ago as she tried to prevent it from destroying a Palestinian home. "No amount of reading could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here," the narrator quotes from Corrie's letter to her mother, as images show Palestinian children walking next to their destroyed and bullet-riddled houses in Gaza. "You just can't imagine it unless you see it. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank shell holes in their walls, and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I'm not even entirely sure that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere." Another advertisement shows black and white images of poor young children -- some smiling, others weeping -- while member of the United Nations Human Rights Fact- Finding Commission Richard Falk recounts a psychological study of 1,000 Palestinian children which reflected how they were "so dehumanised and generally humiliated by the Israeli Defence Forces". However, two of the most moving ads, according to many of those who attended a fund-raising event to mark the launch of the campaign, used no images at all. One opens with a child's laughter, accompanied by a heartbeat and the sound of a machine indicating a normal pulse. Meanwhile, a typed script appears on the screen as the laughter of the child turns into crying, the sound of the heartbeat stops and a long beep is heard: "The collapse of the peace process has caused the death of innocence. Suffering is escalating on both sides. Nearly 500 Palestinian children and over 100 Israeli children have been killed since September 2000. How many children must die? Speak out against the cycle of violence." The other text-only advertisement is accompanied by the sound of an ambulance siren, comparing how it takes an average of five minutes for an ambulance to arrive in the US, while it takes a minimum of 80 minutes and up to three days for an ambulance to reach a Palestinian living under occupation, due to suffocating Israeli checkpoints. The advertisement on Christian Palestinians displays images of an old priest arguing with Israeli soldiers to be allowed to pass through a checkpoint on the way to Jerusalem, nuns walking past tanks and the funeral of a Palestinian Christian killed during the Intifada. Leaders of prominent American Christian churches, meanwhile, provide the narration as they speak of the suffering of Christian Palestinians. Doug Dicks, of the Catholic Relief Services notes how "Palestinian Christians have difficulty getting to churches on Sunday morning if they want to come to Jerusalem, because they don't have the permission or legal right to come to Jerusalem for worship." Father Christiansen of the US Catholic Conference adds: "They [Palestinian Christians] suffer under the occupation just as Muslims suffer the occupation." The advertisement ends as Bishop Bartlett, of the Diocese of Washington, reminds the viewer that, "the majority of the Christians are Palestinians who have been there for thousands of years." "By producing and airing these television spots, Imagine-Life hopes to raise awareness of human rights violations [in occupied Palestinian territories] so that fair-minded Americans will seek to become more involved in resolving these injustices and encouraging peace," reads a statement issued by the group.
