{"id":1357898,"date":"2023-11-28T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-28T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=452871"},"modified":"2023-11-28T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T11:00:00","slug":"how-to-read-the-israeli-kidnapped-posters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/28\/how-to-read-the-israeli-kidnapped-posters\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Read the Israeli \u201cKidnapped\u201d Posters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
S<\/span>hortly after October 7<\/span>, after Hamas entered Israel, murdered over a thousand people, and took more than 200 others hostage, the Israeli artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid quickly formatted \u201ckidnapped\u201d flyers with the photographs and names of some of the captives. They said their motivation wasn\u2019t political, that they were looking to work through their \u201cfear in a dark time<\/a>\u201d by keeping public attention on the captives. Soon, Mintz and Bandaid made the flyers available online, translated into 22 languages, and now the images can be found in cities and on college and university campuses around the world, any place that has a stake in the great game of Middle East politics. Even as some Israeli hostages begin to come home, the posters remain flashpoints of global polarization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some opposed to Israel\u2019s disproportionate assault on Gaza think the flyers are propaganda, a crass manipulation of suffering designed to cement a bond between the United States and Israel and ensure that Washington continues to give Israel both a free hand and what it wants in weapons to continue its assault on Gaza, exempt<\/a> from the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits supplying weapons to states involved in wide-scale human rights violations. As we approach the two-month mark since the hostage-taking, the posters have become rallying points in what is shaping up to be a global war for hearts and minds. Videos of people ripping down the flyers have gone viral<\/a>, providing evidence that those who claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians are heartless and inhumane. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like this,\u201d CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper recently said<\/a> of the posters being ripped down. Some Americans, Tapper said, \u201care actually rooting for the hostage takers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a New Yorker and historian who has worked on political terror in Latin America, I think there is another way to tell the story of the controversy these posters are causing, why some see them as a plea for help and others a call for war. They exist in a loop. In psychoanalytic terms, we might say it\u2019s an endless return, a vortex of shared, unending trauma, starting with the Holocaust, continuing through death-squad terror in Latin America, onward to 9\/11, and now to Gaza and back to the Shoah.<\/p>\n\n\n