How posters of kidnapped Israelis sparked a firestorm on American sidewalks

Exhibiting the posters has become a form of activism, with the more than two hundred hostages seized by Hamas being kept in full view of the public.

But the removal of the posters has quickly become its own form of protest – an outlet as well as a provocation for those anguished by what they say was the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians in the years before October 7 and since the start of the bombing of Gaza.

Some of those caught destroying the posters have been condemned on social media. A dentist in Boston and a person in South Florida, among others, have lost their jobs.

The battle has inflamed already tense emotions. And it encapsulates one of the most hotly debated questions of the war: Whose suffering should command public attention and sympathy?

Those who object to the posters have derided them as war propaganda. Critics of those who tore it down have characterized the act as anti-Semitic and lacking basic humanity. The disputes increasingly appear to be teetering on the edge of violence, a life and death struggle in the Middle East.

Nasty Nitzan Mintz, one of the artists behind the kites, seeing them go viral in the first place was a shock. When she saw people tearing down the posters, it became clear that what she was saying was clearly anti-Semitism. “As it happens, this campaign has done more than raise awareness among the abducted people,” she said. “It made us aware of how hated we are as a community.”

The skirmishes over the posters are both old-fashioned – lined with paper and tape and bare hands – and very modern. Social media has the power to elevate street corner disputes to international incidents, and images of people tearing down signs have clogged the internet in recent days.

In a video shot in Queens and posted to social media, a group of men who say they are not Jewish are confronted by a man tearing down posters. “I’m dying to admit you to the hospital,” one of them says, adding an expletive.

At Boston University, a young woman caught removing signs seems both determined to defend itself and uncomfortable about being documented. “Why are you filming?” she asks the man behind the camera. “To show where the hate on this campus comes from,” he answers.

In yet another video a man identified by The New York Post while a Broadway producer uses scissors to remove a poster from an electrical box on West 62nd Street in Manhattan and throws it in the trash.

Regulations around where fliers can be placed are usually set by local governments, and college campuses usually have their own rules, says Tim Zick, a law professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The most salient issue, he said, is that of free speech. “As a matter of freedom of expression, people who oppose the ‘kidnapped’ posters can put up their own posters where they can express their views,” Professor Zick said.

The Broadway producer’s video was made public on the Instagram account associated with I Love the Upper West Side, a community news site in New York, owned and operated by Mike Mishkin.

Mr Mishkin said he was “inundated” with videos and photos of people tearing down posters. He has posted about a half-dozen on his two local news websites. “I have been given more than I could ever share,” he said.

Although Mr. Mishkin, who is Jewish, has not published the names of the people in these images, he knows that other news media and digital platforms will track them down and make them public. He doesn’t have a bad feeling about it. “If they don’t want to get caught, they should have thought about that first,” he said.

He rejects the excuses shared online — that people are removing the posters because they were placed illegally on public property or because people want to clean up their neighborhood.

“I don’t think they’re vandalizing ‘Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar’ posters,” he said.

In fact, the motivations of those who remove signs take different forms. And as unnerving as the removal of the posters has been for some Jews and supporters of Israel, at least some of the people who tore them down are themselves Jewish.

Miles Grant, 24, removes posters in New York “occasionally,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s the lack of context that irritates me,” said Mr. Grant, who said he is Jewish and a self-described “pro-Palestinian who is not a Zionist.”

“It’s so clear that they don’t care about people’s lives,” he said of those who put up the “kidnapped” posters.

If they did, he said, the posters would include details explaining the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Why did this happen and what events led to it? That’s what’s missing, and I think it’s intentional.”

He said he sometimes worried about being in a viral video, but he hasn’t let that deter him. “I think they put them up to entice people to take them down,” he said. “I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives.”

A woman in Brooklyn, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she said her family would be upset by the publicity, said she removed “kidnapped” posters after a friend in an activist group chat encouraged her. The posters, the friend said, were anti-Islamic war propaganda.

“So I said, ‘Cool beans, let’s get them out.'”

Ms. Mintz, one of the artists behind the posters, described her campaign as a way for Jews to deal with their own fear during a dark time. “The way we can express our concerns about the abductees is to put up the poster so that we don’t bump into a wall or commit suicide,” she said.

She and her partner, Dede Bandaid, work with teams of volunteers who roam New York to put up the posters. “People do it because they are very stressed, very worried and very scared,” she said.

She said they had received permission from the family members of the hostages featured in their posters, and that family members had often contacted them asking them to create a poster featuring their kidnapped loved ones.

Criticism of the posters is causing division within the progressive Jewish community. Last week, Rafael Shimunov, a Jewish peace activist affiliated with a street art group called Art V War, said Posted a long video on Instagram in which he reflects on the reasons why some people put up the posters, including ‘public mourning’, and others remove them.

He did not support removing the posters, but said the people who put them up should also make posters of missing Palestinians. The posters “don’t show Palestinians, so they’re worried about missing people?” he asked.

In the video, as he walks through Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and talks to the camera, he says there are few posters in the neighborhood, except for a Palestinian restaurant.

“These posters are being used to target the Palestinians in our community,” he says, concluding: “If you reflexively attack the people they are putting down, maybe try to understand why they are putting them down.”

And, he says, some of the people putting up the posters may also have benign motives — while for others, “the plan is to foment war.”

On a Jewish list of social justice, Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israeli-born New Yorker, called Mr. Shimunov’s video “an abomination.” “We can do better than tear down our family’s pleas for redemption while fighting to prevent Palestinian bloodshed and horror,” he wrote.

Adjustments have been made to the signs in the past week; some undermine the original intent of the posters and others support it.

On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Councilwoman Julie Menin saw a poster which looked like the originals – but instead of the word ‘Kidnapped’ it said ‘Occupier’, with an image of a young girl with the caption: ‘Ella Elyakim, 8-year-old Israeli.” “This is unacceptable,” Ms. Menin responded on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Last weekend, on the corner of Broadway and 96th Street, half-torn posters were covered with small fliers that read: “Why are the posters of kidnapped Israelis being torn down? Because they don’t want you to know the truth.’

And on Wednesday, a group of 238 Holocaust survivors plan to gather in New York and pose for a portrait organized by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. Each survivor will hold a ‘Kidnapped’ poster, which draws a stark link between the horrors of the Second World War and the current conflict.

On Long Island, Guy Tsadik has found a way to make sure the posters stick. With friends and relatives, he went door to door through the towns of Cedarhurst, Hewlett, Inwood, Lawrence and Woodmere, asking store and restaurant owners to hang the “kidnapped” posters in street windows. He has friends doing the same in New Jersey and Florida.

“This way it is not possible to damage or remove them,” Mr Tsadik said.

Alain Delaqueriere research contributed.