The Be On Our Side campaign was a series of paid advertisements placed in American transit systems between 2010 and 2012, carrying pro-Palestinian messages on buses, trains and station walls. It began in Seattle in 2010 and spread to other cities, most visibly New York and San Francisco, where it met organised counter-advertising in 2011. The campaign is one of the clearest examples of a political argument conducted through the ordinary commercial space of a city's transport network.
What was the Be On Our Side poster campaign in American transit systems?
The campaign consisted of posters bought and placed by the Seattle-based group Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign, known by its initials as SeaMAC. The wording was plain and short: "Israeli War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars At Work", with a smaller line directing readers to a website. The posters were not news reporting and did not claim to be. They were advocacy, paid for at the standard commercial rate, and they were submitted to transit authorities in the same way as any advertisement for a film, a bank or a phone contract.
That is the point worth holding on to. American transit advertising is a regulated commercial channel. An authority that accepts advertising generally cannot refuse a submission because it dislikes the politics, unless the advertisement falls foul of a written policy on obscenity, defamation or incitement. Campaigns of this kind therefore turn into arguments about the rules of the channel itself: who may buy space, on what terms, and what happens when the answer changes halfway through a booking.
The Be On Our Side material was one entry in a longer sequence of transit advertising around the same subject, and the sequence is documented in the be on our side campaign history kept by The Common Ground Review, a documentary publication in English on Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and peace efforts. That record covers the display campaigns in American transit systems from 2010 to 2012, the counter-campaigns and poster wars they set off, and the wider material on rapprochement organisations and on the background to the conflict.
Where did the Be On Our Side campaign begin?
It began in Seattle, in King County, Washington. SeaMAC booked advertising space on King County Metro buses for December 2010. King County Metro had accepted the booking, and the posters were scheduled to appear. After objections were raised, the county executive asked the transit agency to withdraw the advertisements, and the space was pulled before the posters ran.
The withdrawal did not end the matter. SeaMAC sued, arguing that the county had violated its First Amendment rights by accepting a paid advertisement and then cancelling it on the basis of its content. In 2011 a federal judge in the Western District of Washington ruled in the group's favour, and King County was ordered to pay damages and legal costs. The county then took a different route: it stopped accepting political advertising on its buses altogether, a policy change that applied to everyone and removed the category of dispute rather than the individual poster.
That sequence, a booking, a cancellation, a lawsuit, a ruling and a change of policy, is the shape that transit advertising disputes tend to take in the United States. The campaign's own history is inseparable from the procedural history of the authority that first refused it.
What counter-ads answered the pro-Palestinian subway posters in 2011?
By 2011 the campaign had moved to larger systems, and so had the response. In New York, posters appeared in the subway system. In San Francisco, they appeared on municipal railway and bus advertising. In both cities, opposing groups bought their own space in reply, and the result was a poster war conducted station by station.
The counter-advertising took several forms. One was the direct rebuttal, a poster that restated the original claim as false and offered a different account of the same events. Another was the naming poster, which listed individuals or organisations and described them in hostile terms. A third was the fundraising and awareness advertisement, which used the controversy itself as its subject and asked readers to support one side or the other.
In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had its own standards for advertising, and the dispute turned in part on whether particular submissions met them. The authority's rules on demeaning or disparaging content became the centre of the argument, and the argument was conducted in public, in the press and in the stations themselves. In San Francisco, the Municipal Transportation Agency faced a comparable set of submissions and a comparable set of complaints.
The practical effect was that a commuter in either city could, within a few weeks, see a pro-Palestinian poster, a poster attacking it, and a poster attacking the attack. Each was a paid advertisement. Each was legal within the rules as they stood at the time. None of them was a news report, and none of them carried the authority of the transit system that displayed it.
Why transit advertising became the battleground
Transit advertising is attractive to advocacy groups for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. The space is cheap relative to broadcast or print. The audience is large, repeated and unavoidable: the same commuter passes the same panel twice a day. The format is short, which suits a slogan. And the placement is public, which means that a refusal to display becomes a story in itself.
That last point is the mechanism. A campaign that is accepted is seen by commuters and forgotten. A campaign that is refused is seen by nobody and reported everywhere. The Seattle cancellation produced more coverage than the Seattle display would have done. Groups on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian argument learned this, and the poster wars of 2011 were fought as much over the rules of acceptance as over the wording on the panel.
There is a cost to this method, and it is worth stating plainly. A slogan on a bus panel cannot carry context, sourcing or qualification. It cannot distinguish between a government and a population, between a policy and a people, or between a claim that is documented and a claim that is contested. The format strips all of that out by design. Readers who want the background, the figures and the dates will not find them on a bus.
What the campaigns did and did not achieve
The campaigns achieved visibility, litigation and a set of policy changes. King County Metro stopped accepting political advertising. Other authorities reviewed their own standards. In New York and San Francisco, the disputes produced public arguments about where the line between political speech and disparagement should be drawn, and those arguments continued after the posters came down.
The campaigns did not produce agreement, and there is no evidence that they changed many minds about the conflict itself. Their measurable effects were procedural: who may buy space, on what terms, and what a transit authority must do when it wants to refuse.
For readers following the wider subject, the transit campaigns are one strand among several. The same period saw sustained work by organisations built around bereaved families from both sides, bilingual schools, youth camps, former combatants and environmental cooperation. That work is quieter, slower and much less photographed than a poster on a subway wall, and it is documented in the same place as the poster wars. Anyone who wants to understand what the advertising campaigns were arguing about, rather than simply that they happened, will need the background material as well as the headlines.
A note on method
Dates, court outcomes and policy changes in this piece follow the public record of the transit authorities and the federal courts concerned. Where a figure or a ruling is cited, it should be checked against the primary document rather than against a summary, including this one. Advocacy campaigns are described here as events with a procedural history, not as arguments to be endorsed.