Paper Provocations? The Psychology of Tearing Down Israeli Hostage Posters

• In Event: Political Psychology in the Wake of Violence

Abstract

In the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack that killed 1200 people, 260 hostages were captured and taken to Gaza. In the days after the attack, posters of the missing hostages appeared in cities throughout North America. The poster campaign was started by an organization called, Let the World Know, headed by Anna Tambini, an Israeli from San Francisco. Volunteers across North America hung posters on streetlights and posts, subway walls, coffee shops and on university campuses. Each poster featured an individual photograph and name with a call to action: “Take a photo of this poster and share it. Please help bring them home alive.”
Yet unlike historical campaigns to release hostages (e.g., Bring Back our Girls), these posters became a lightning rod for political polarization. Those tearing down the “Kidnapped” Israelis’ posters likely believed they were engaged in justified and righteous actions despite the implied cruelty: typically, the public responds to the cause of missing, kidnapped, or abused people, especially children, amplifying rather than suppressing information about them. For those putting up the posters, the goal was to pressure foreign governments to influence Hamas to release the hostages and sustain American pressure, whereas for pro-Palestinian groups tearing the posters down, they considered them “paper provocations.”
This paper analyzes the October -December 2023 poster defacing campaign. The paper uses a dual methodology of coding 100 publicly available videos of people tearing down posters to determine demographic characteristics and assess the psychology of those involved together with public opinion surveys to assess what people felt and thought of the poster campaign, ascertain whether tearing down posters was correlated with antisemitic views, or whether other political ideologies were prevalent.

Authors

• Mia M. Bloom, Georgia State University

• Sophia Moskalenko, Georgia State University