ISRAEL: Cannes awards campaign for abducted soldiers

Israel and Hezbollah are evidently moving toward a prisoner exchange deal that will bring home the two Israeli army reservists kidnapped in July 2006, an incident which triggered the second Lebanon war. After two long years of public campaigning and private anguish, the families may soon attain closure as the second anniversary of the kidnapping approaches and reports of an imminent deal persist.

Between press interviews, meeting with government officials and attending support rallies, it is doubtful whether the families had time to pay attention to the 55th international advertising festival in Cannes this week. But Cannes paid attention to them and perhaps tribute too as it granted a prestigious Golden Lion award to an Israeli advertising agency for a public awareness campaign it ran last year to keep the missing soldiers atop the nation's agenda.

The campaign called for a five-minute Internet blackout on the first anniversary of the kidnappings. More than 400 Israeli websites complied and on July 12 at 9:05 a.m. -- the exact hour of the blast that had killed three soldiers and injured another three, including Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped -- shut down and posted a Web page with the message "the soldiers cannot be found," designed like the universal "page cannot be found" message one gets when loading an inactive website. Television and radio stations stopped broadcasting, too, to participate in what became an Internet equivalent of the minutes of silence observed on somber commemoration days in Israel.

The campaign was produced pro-bono for an activist organization promoting awareness of the abductees' agenda by Y&R Interactive, of the Israeli office of Shalmor, Avnon, Amichay/Y&R.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit remains captive in Gaza. Seven hundred twenty-three -- and a lot of people are counting.

-- Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem

Photo: "The soldiers cannot be found" on the MSN website. Click to enlarge. Image courtesy of Shalmor, Avnon, Amichay/Y&R.

Comments

[Gábor Fränkl]

I can only hope that you will not censor my counter-argument to the above commenter. If you still did, it just shows that this paper does not have any democratic credentilals, or that it tolerates democratic open debate.

Sean, you do not know what you are talking (writing) about. Sorry to disillusion you, but:

1. There is absolutely no equivalence between Hezbo and the IDF. One is a tool of Iran - justifiably labelled as a terrorist group, even if hundreds of thousands of citizens support this terror group wholeheartedly. There catalogue of sins is so long one can just remind you of killing 243 American amrines by blowing them up in their barracks in Beirut in the early 1980s. The other (IDF) is still a legitimate army under the control of a democratically elected government.

2. You seem to be hostile to the IDF and your verbal preverication just cannot hide this fact. The IDF soldiers were on Israeli territory - contrary to the lies and misinformation spread by enemy propaganda - when they were "taken" - so here you have a neutral term - happy now?
And a last personal remark: the horribly - and in my view disgustingly hostile anti-Israeli California has no shortages of Israel-hating bigots in its midst. Golden state? Ohhh, My a**!

[sean]

I've always been uncomfortable with the word "kidnapped" in this context. Since the word comes from taking a child against his or her will, there is the idea that a peaceful person has been taken by a belligerent. In other words, it effaces the fact that those soldiers were also belligerents (Lebanon and Israel are still technically at war) and gives the act immediate illegitimacy, thus inserting a value judgment into what ought to be just a description.

Strangely enough, when Lebanese farmers or peasants are taken from the Lebanese side of the border, they are usually described in the Israeli and American press as having been "arrested" or "detained," words that lend some legitimacy to the action.

I'd like to see an end to this sort of biased language in reporting. Ideally, whenever belligerents are taken by their enemies, be they IDF or Hezbollah, they should be described as having been captured. And whenever civilians are taken from their own national territory by a foreign government or organization, only then could we describe them as having been kidnapped.