ADL Blasts Israel Map Train Station Ads

Editor's Note: Below is a copy of a response that the Anti-Defamation League has made to changes in Israel's territory over time. The letter was sent out by Assemblyman Robert Castelli, who the ads.

Henry Clifford is an anti-Israel activist based in Rye, New York in Westchester County. Clifford is the co-chairman of a small anti-Israel group called the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine (COPIP). Over the past few years, the group has endorsed several anti-Israel initiatives including a Jewish Voice for Peace-led divestment campaign targeting TIAA-CREF for investing in companies that allegedly help Israel maintain the occupation; the Occupy AIPAC conference that took place in March; and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in February 2012.

COPIP is a member group of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a major anti-Israel coalition based in Washington, D.C.

COPIP maintains a blog that has several entries, including one that features the image pictured on the right. The flier, signed by Henry Clifford, is dated May 2011 and it appears to condone or explain Palestinian terrorism as a product of Israeli policy. The flier, in part, reads, “Mothers do not raise their children to be terrorists. Only when all hope is lost for a decent, secure life is a terrorist created.” It later asks, “Could it be that billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Israel is actually helping to create terrorists?”

Clifford also expresses anti-Israel messages beyond his work with COPIP, including writing “letters to the editor” to some newspapers in his area, as well as comments on news websites. In September 2011, for example, Clifford wrote a letter to The Day of Connecticut responding to an article about Palestinian unilateral declaration efforts at the U.N. He argued that the initiative is legitimate because the negotiating table has “produced absolutely no results” and compared it to the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948. He also posted a comment on the Web site of USNews.com in January 2009 (shortly after the Gaza War) in which he called for Israel to “acknowledge what all informed people know...that Zionist/Israeli leaders always planned to take over all or most of Palestine and to expel as many Arabs as would be necessary.”

In 2008, Clifford participated in a delegation of activists to the Middle East that was organized by the anti-Israel organization, the Council for the National Interest (CNI). While in the region, the delegates met with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Response to Billboards

The billboards feature four maps depicting the status of the land of Palestine in 1946; the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan; the State of Israel before the 1967 Six Days War; and the State of Israel in 2010 including Palestinian territories “occupied” by Israel.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, is extremely complex and cannot be summarized in a series of four maps.

The maps fail to reflect several key facts:

• Prior to 1948, much of the land was owned by non-Palestinian absentee landlords who lived in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad.
• Israel has made repeated efforts to exchange land for peace, such as the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, which led Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula; the full disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which gave control of the territory to the Palestinian leadership, and other Israeli pull-backs from the West Bank that granted administrative control of a number of cities to the Palestinian Authority.
• The commitment of successive Israeli governments to achieving a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and an expressed desire to engage in land swaps of major settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a final status agreement. This commitment by Israel has been met by repeated failures on the part of the Palestinian leadership to seriously engage with Israel in peace talks.
• Israel maintains that since the Palestinian refugees are the result of a war forced upon Israel by invading Arab armies, it is not responsible for the current plight of the refugees. However, Israel has stated that, on humanitarian grounds, it would participate in an international effort to resolve the situation, including helping refugees settle in an established state of Palestine, contributing to an international refugee compensation fund and considering individual cases of family reunification for refugees with Israeli relatives.