Give Me A Ring Sometime

Here's the advert clip for Cellcom Israel:



and here's the Reuters report found in the Washington Post in full, for a reason:

Israel phone firm's West Bank wall gag fails to amuse

By Allyn Fisher-Ilan and Alastair Macdonald
Reuters
Sunday, July 12, 2009 3:34 PM

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A television advert for an Israeli cellphone firm showing soldiers playing soccer over the West Bank barrier has sparked cries of bad taste and prompted Arab lawmakers on Sunday to demand it be taken off air.

The jaunty commercial for Israel's biggest mobile phone company Cellcom makes light of Palestinian suffering and shows how far Israelis fail to understand their neighbors, critics said. The company stood by the ad, however.

It shows a ball falling on an Israeli army jeep from the far side of a towering wall. A game ensues, back and forth with the unseen Palestinians after a soldier dials up "reinforcements," including two smiling women in uniform, to come and play.

The advertisement made by McCann Erickson, part of U.S. Interpublic Group, ends with the upbeat voiceover: "After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun."

Since the ad went out last week -- as Palestinians marked the fifth anniversary of a World Court ruling that Israel's walls and fences in the West Bank were illegal -- some Israelis have taken to blogs and social networking sites to voice dismay.

"Aside from being a great contender for the 'creepiest ads of all time', this one-minute ad says a lot about how mainstream Israel likes to see itself and the Palestinians," journalist Dimi Reider wrote in a blog which concluded most of his fellow Israelis did not understand Palestinians' rage at the barrier.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of Israel's parliament, said he had written to Cellcom demanding it pull the ad: "The barrier separates families and prevents children from reaching schools and clinics," he told Reuters. "Yet the advertisement presents the barrier as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv."

"RACIST COMMERCIAL"

Few Palestinians watch the Israeli stations where the advert aired but there was outrage among liberal Israelis on the Web.

A Hebrew-language Facebook group called "I too got nauseous watching the new Cellcom ad" had signed up 218 members. They demanded "take this racist commercial off the air immediately."

Israeli blogger Ami Kaufman told Reuters: "We see Israeli soldiers playing with ... the people that they are incarcerating behind the wall. But the most grotesque, most disturbing part of this ad is the fact that the Palestinians basically aren't seen ... They're like monsters or aliens ... This is the alienation that Israeli society feels toward the Palestinian people."

Noam Sheizaf, another Israeli journalist and blogger, said it distorted reality: "In reality, if a Palestinian comes close to the fence to return a football ... he is likely to get shot."

Asked to comment, Cellcom said its "core value is communication between people" regardless of "religion, race or gender." It said the commercial illustrated the possibility for people of diverse opinions to engage in "mutual entertainment."

A spokeswoman said it was a coincidence the ad came out so close to last Thursday's anniversary of the 2004 decision by the World Court that Israel had no right to build hundreds of miles of walls and fences on Palestinian land it took in a 1967 war.

Israel built the barrier with the declared aim of stopping suicide bombers. For Palestinians, it has become one of the most hated symbols of Israeli occupation, a land grab whose course round Jewish settlements would cripple any state they establish.

(Additional reporting by Joseph Nasr, Jeffrey Heller and Reuters Television; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Five reporters. For one story about a lousy commercial!

Anyone supporting the commercial outside of Cellcom interviewed?

What's racist about it?

Bad taste? Would the use of Paris Hilton have made it better?

But let's get political: if the Arabs think that they will ever get a state and that at that time they will be able freely to cross over into Israel, they are more naive than I thought. At that fictional future time, the border will be protected even more so than today. If Israel cannot have an armed presence in this putative "Palestine" or any intelligence services, heck, the border will be sealed off.

But, you ask, perhaps, isn't Israel stealing land? And I reply, wait. How did the 1967 war start which enabled Israel to be in the position it is in now? Arab aggression. Arab terror. Palestine Liberation Organization. Fatah.

So, if there's to be territorial compromise, territories-for-peace, what land are the Arabs going to yield up as part of the deal?

You mean they get to start the war and get everything back?

Whoa, there. I think I'm going to make another clip about that.

Something along the lines of "I'll be waiting for your ring".

Cell Phones and Literature (and History)

I always joked that if we had cell phones at the beginning of our Gush Emunim activity in 1974-75, we would have run rings around the army.

Well, a similar thought came to a literary critic:-

...cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call “real life” (though I’m still to come to a final verdict on that), are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story.

Think of all the stories that hinge on the simple fact that X has no idea where Y is and no way of finding out. Take the “Odyssey.” With cellphones, it becomes an epic version of “Honey, I’m on the train; is there anything you need from the store?” Reception’s a bit dodgy between Scylla and Charybdis, I bet, and things might get noisy sometimes (“Sorry! That’s just the Sirens!”), but you’d have your hero home before tea and save everyone a passel of trouble.

Think about it. No “Robinson Crusoe.” No “Lord of the Flies.” No pleasure for the reader in being alone in the knowledge that Penelope, say, has reason to keep the suitors at bay, or that Angel Clare could again love his Tess. “Dramatic irony” is what the critics call it; to readers it’s simply delicious, the blend of hope and despair that ignorance and distance can impart. The atmosphere on that train out of Moscow would have been rather different if Mrs. Karenina had had a Nokia tucked into her coat: “Toward morning Anna, while still sitting up, fell into a doze; when she woke it was already light and the train was approaching Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, her husband, her son, and the cares of the coming day and of those that would follow, beset her. And then Anna’s phone rang.” Tolstoy tells us that Anna, as she returned to married life despite having another man, Vronsky, in her heart, “did not sleep at all that night, but the strain and the visions which filled her imagination had nothing unpleasant or dismal about them; on the contrary they seemed joyful, glowing and stimulating.” Would her imagination have been so active, one wonders, if she’d been able to gossip to her friends until her batteries ran down? Would she have thrown herself under a train if Vronsky had been able to reach her on her cell? Would “Anna Karenina” be 800 pages long?