How Posters of Kidnapped Israelis Ignited a Firestorm on American Sidewalks

“KIDNAPPED,” the posters say, in big block letters above pictures of people taken hostage by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, urgent reminders of the men, women and children still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

But on college campuses and in cities around the world in recent weeks, people have been caught tearing them down.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” a man says in a video posted on social media as he watches two young people at the University of Southern California shove wadded-up posters into the trash.

“They’re making the conflict worse,” one of the young people replies, adding, “I’m not a fan of Hamas.”

In the weeks since the war in the Middle East started, the “kidnapped” posters, created by Israeli street artists, have grown ubiquitous, papering public spaces across the United States, Western Europe and beyond. Available to anyone with an internet connection, they can be printed out and pasted onto lampposts, boarded-up storefronts and subway entrances.

Displaying the posters has become a form of activism, keeping the more than 200 hostages seized by Hamas in full view of the public. But removing the posters has quickly emerged as its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation by those anguished by what they say was the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians in the years before Oct. 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began. 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 captures one of the most fervently debated questions of the war: Whose suffering should command public attention and sympathy?

Those who object to the posters have derided them as wartime propaganda. Critics of those tearing them down have characterized the act as antisemitic and lacking basic humanity. Increasingly, the disputes seem to teeter on the brink of violence, a proxy battle for the life-or-death war in the Middle East.

To Nitzan Mintz, one of the artists behind the flyers, watching them go viral in the first place was a shock. Seeing people rip down the posters has revealed what she said was clear antisemitism. “By accident this campaign did more than bring an awareness of the kidnapped people,” she said. “It brought awareness of how hated we are as a community.”

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

In one video taken in New York City’s Queens borough and posted on social media, a group of men who say they are not Jewish confront a man who is tearing down posters. “I’m dying to put you in the hospital,” one of them says, adding an expletive.

At Boston University, a young woman caught removing signs appears both determined to defend herself and uneasy about being documented. “Why are you filming?” she asks the man behind the camera. “To show where the hate is coming from on this campus,” he replies.

In yet another video, a man identified by The New York Post as a Broadway producer is seen using scissors to remove a poster from a utility box on West 62nd Street in Manhattan and tossing it into the trash.

Regulations surrounding where flyers are allowed to be posted tend to be made by local governments, and college campuses usually have their own rules, said Tim Zick, a professor of law at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The salient issue, he said, is one of free expression. “As a matter of free speech, people who oppose the ‘kidnapped’ posters could erect posters of their own, expressing their views,” Zick said.

The video of the Broadway producer 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.

Mishkin said he had been “flooded” with videos and photographs showing people tearing down posters. He has included about a half dozen on his two local news websites. “I’ve gotten more than I could possibly share,” he said.

While Mishkin, who is Jewish, has not published the names of people included in these images, he knows that other news media outlets and digital platforms will sleuth them out and make them public. He does not feel badly about it. “If they don’t want to be caught doing it, they should have thought of that first,” he said.

He dismisses the excuses that have been shared online — that people are taking the posters down because they’re illegally posted on public property or because people want to clean up their neighborhood.

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

In fact, the motivations of those removing signs take a variety of 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 tearing them down are Jewish themselves.

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

“It’s so obvious that they don’t care about people’s lives,” he said of those putting up the “kidnapped” posters. If they did, he said, the posters would include details explaining the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. “Why did this happen and what are the events that led to this happening? That is what’s missing, and I think it’s intentional.”

He said he had felt concerned at times that he would end up in a viral video, but he has not let that deter him. “I think they’re putting them up to bait people to take them down,” he said. “I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives.”

A woman in the Brooklyn borough, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said her family would be upset by the publicity, said she had torn down “kidnapped” posters after a friend in a group chat for activists encouraged her. The posters, she said the friend told her, amounted to anti-Islamic war propaganda.

“So I said, ‘Cool beans, let’s take them down.’”

Mintz, one of the artists behind the posters, described her campaign as a way for Jews to deal with their own fear in a dark time. “The way we can express our worry over the kidnapped is to put up the poster, so that we don’t punch a wall or commit suicide,” she said.

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

She said they had permission from the relatives of the hostages featured on their posters, and that family members had often contacted them to request that they make a poster to include their kidnapped loved ones.

Criticism of the posters is creating dissension within the progressive Jewish community. Last week, Rafael Shimunov, a Jewish peace activist affiliated with a street art group called Art V War, posted a lengthy video on Instagram in which he considers the reasons some people put up the posters, including “public mourning,” and others take them down. He did not endorse the removal of the posters, but said the people putting them up should also create posters of Palestinians who are missing. The posters “don’t include Palestinians, so are they concerned about missing people?” he asked.

In the video, as he walks around the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn talking to the camera, he says the area has few posters up, except for in front of a Palestinian restaurant. “These posters are being used to target Palestinians in our community,” he says, concluding: “When you’re reflexively attacking the people taking them down, maybe try to understand why they’re taking them down.”

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

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

In the past week, adaptations of the signs have emerged — some subverting the original intent of the posters and some supporting them.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Council member Julie Menin spotted a poster that looked like the originals — but instead of the word “Kidnapped” it said “Occupier,” bearing an image of a young girl with the caption: “Ella Elyakim, 8-year-old Israeli.” “This is unacceptable,” Menin commented on X, formerly known as Twitter.

At the corner of Broadway and 96th Street last weekend, half-ripped posters were covered with small flyers that said: “Why are the posters of kidnapped Israelis being ripped down? Because they don’t want you to know the truth.”

And on Wednesday in New York, a group of 238 Holocaust survivors plan to gather and pose for a portrait organized by the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. Each survivor will hold a “Kidnapped” poster, drawing a sharp connection between the horrors of World War II and the current conflict.

On Long Island, New York, Guy Tsadik has found a way to ensure that the posters stay up. With friends and relatives, he has gone door-to-door through the towns of Cedarhurst, Hewlett, Inwood, Lawrence and Woodmere and asked store and restaurant owners to display the “kidnapped” posters inside windows that face the street. He has friends doing the same in New Jersey and Florida.

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

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/nyregion/israel-gaza-kidnapped-poster-fight.html">The New York Times</a>.