They're back!

What connection could there be between the release of Gilad Schalit and the exclusion of women from public advertisements? Well, there is no real connection, just an ironic coincidence – one of those that sometimes defy imagination.

Schalit was set free on October 18 of last year after more than five years of captivity by Hamas, but that information was already released five days before. For security reasons, the Israeli media were required to remain silent about that sensitive issue for the three days preceding the soldier’s liberation, and the gap in the news in the Israeli papers had to be filled in some way.

At one Hebrew-language newspaper, that lacuna couldn’t have come at a better time, as its Jerusalem correspondent had a “good story” ready that he was eager to publish. “Why have the women of Jerusalem disappeared from public advertising?” asked the writer in the article he published in the Friday issue of the paper, revealing what most of the city’s residents had become so accustomed to that they didn’t even notice – that women no longer appeared on billboards or advertising posters anywhere in the capital.

Despite the generally euphoric atmosphere in the country following Schalit’s release, the article got a lot of attention, and since then, the public debate about excluding women from advertisements had not abated. Until last week, that is. In answer to a request by the High Court of Justice, Transportation Minister Israel Katz announced that Cna’an, the advertising agency that places ads on city buses, had no right to prevent women from appearing in its ads.

Rabbi Uri Ayalon, director of the Yerushalmim party (also represented by Rachel Azaria on the city council), is the driving force behind the return of women to commercial publicity. In an interview with In Jerusalem, Ayalon recalls the long road it took to attain that result.

“We’d already had a bad experience with Cna’an,” says Ayalon.

“In 2008, during the city council election campaign, it refused to display pictures of the female candidates, but that was connected to the elections campaign.”

At the time, Azaria took the company to the High Court, which ruled that the pictures of the female candidates should appear on the bus ads – a ruling that was delivered only one day before the elections.

But this time the situation was much more complicated and required an investigation into what was being excluded and where (for example, ad campaigns specially adapted to what was assumed to be the character of the city) and who was actually orchestrating the exclusion.

“In fact,” says Ayalon, ”we became aware of the situation even before that, when we learned from the press, along with the rest of the country, that religious IDF cadets walked out of an official ceremony in protest because female soldiers were singing on stage. And that happened on September 12 of last year.”

Following that event, Ayalon and members of Yerushalmim opened a site on Facebook that they called “Uncensored – fighting women’s exclusion from public spaces,” which virtually became an overnight success.

“Those were the days of the end of the summer protest, and this issue emerged as something that could still be connected with a general sense of resentment and protest but with a clearly local flavor,” says Ayalon.

Within a few days, the website had more than 3,700 subscribers.

From then on, the issue of the absence of women from public ads became almost an obsession, and Ayalon and a large number of volunteers from his party started looking for overt examples. And there were many.

What they first discovered was that commercial ad campaigns had two different sets of pictures – one for Jerusalem and one for the rest of the country – while on public (in fact, municipal) billboards, no women appeared at all. Public ads in the city go through three major paths: the municipality’s advertising through Ariel (the subsidiary in charge of production and logistics for cultural events) and two private advertisers – Zohar for billboards and posters and Cna’an for advertising on Egged city buses.

The first task would be to work on the municipality. But before that, Ayalon decided to launch a local initiative. He invited female residents of Jerusalem to pose for a poster that would be displayed throughout the city as a response to their disappearance. A total of 70 posters were produced and hung on residential windows and balconies.

But then someone discovered a Honigman fashion poster in which Israeli model Sandy Bar appeared with her head cut off.

A quick check of the Honigman advertisements in Tel Aviv revealed what was already suspected at Yerushalmim – that Bar’s lovely head appeared in full on the posters there.

“We called Honigman and inquired about that strange decision. Its answer was that it had to do so according to the Municipality of Jerusalem’s request,” recounts Ayalon.

Naturally, he then asked the municipality about that strange request.

The reaction from Safra Square was quite assertive. They said there had never been any such request from the municipality, and they threatened to sue Honigman if the company didn’t retract that claim.

It soon came to light that the decision and the request to censor the posters came from Zohar, the advertising company that displays all the posters in Jerusalem.

“We called Zohar to ask for an explanation and, well, they didn’t even try to hide their practice and immediately confirmed it, arguing that they had to do it for fear that haredim would vandalize the billboards and cause them financial damage,” says Ayalon.

But, nevertheless, the idea of challenging the municipality on this issue remained. Ayalon decided to ask Ariel to display the posters of the women residents who posed for the “uncensored” campaign on the municipality’s billboards.

“The first reaction of the employee at Ariel – which we recorded by the way – was a big laugh, followed by her declaration that it wouldn’t take more than a few hours for all the posters to be vandalized,” says Ayalon.

Nevertheless, all the 140 posters were displayed, featuring local women of various ages, clothing styles and poses. To everyone’s surprise, only four were defaced. The other 136 remained untouched.

“So by then, we realized that nobody ever asked the advertisers not to use pictures of women. It was more an assumption of the advertisers, who believed that haredi vandals would immediately destroy any billboard or bus ad that showed such images,” says Ayalon.

NOW WHAT they had to do was confront the private businesses that yielded to the unofficial request not to show women in any advertising campaign in Jerusalem. One of Ayalon’s team’s biggest discoveries was the dramatic differences that were made to the visuals of the ads once they were to be displayed in the city. It soon became evident that this was a kind of standard, and there were many examples.

Isracard, the credit card company, took actress Gila Almagor off the posters it displayed in Jerusalem. Honigman cut off model Sandy Bar’s head and left only her body holding a handbag. There were posters of gyms where the model that appeared in the Tel Aviv ad disappeared en route to Jerusalem. But the case that really made Ayalon angry, he says, was, by the end of November 2011, the advertisements of Adi, the National Transplant Center.

“All over the country their poster showed men and women, but in Jerusalem only men appeared,” says Ayalon, who felt it was going too far.

“In that case we succeeded in persuading the Adi people to change their policy. Quite honestly, we made them feel a little ashamed of themselves,” he says.

And indeed, the next poster of the organization included women, just like in Tel Aviv. Ayalon says that it was a turning point, since by then even Zohar had agreed to bring women back to public spaces by displaying posters like the rest of the country.

What remained to deal with was Cna’an. It is a private company, but Ayalon discovered that the responsibility still remained in the hands of Egged. He says it didn’t take him long to understand that it was not going to change its policy unless it was forced to do so.

At that point, he petitioned the High Court of Justice requesting that the Transportation Ministry rule that Egged and Cna’an allow images of women on bus ads. The court approved the petition and requested a response from the ministry within a month. One month turned into more than two months (in accordance with the ministry’s request).

Then last week, the transportation minister submitted a demand to nullify the court’s ruling, since the ministry accepted the court’s request and thus will obligate Egged and Cna’an to observe the law and include images of women in their advertisements.

The basis on which the minister made the decision was simply that nowhere in Egged’s or Can’an’s contract was it written that they had permission to disregard the local law that forbids discrimination against women. That left them no choice but to respect the law by displaying women’s images again.

“I think it is a clear case of a situation in which a vacuum is automatically filled,” concludes Ayalon, adding that residents simply got used to seeing posters without women, and that was the first thing that required a change.

“Our values have to be respected and taken seriously. From this we learn that we shouldn’t conduct our lives according to how we think others will react. We should just stick to our values. It’s that simple,” he says.