They waited about one minute in all. As soon as the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was announced on Aug. 26, commercial networks and large companies went back to flooding Israelis’ cell phones with ads. The fact is that they were doing it even earlier too, long before the military campaign was officially over, during the various temporary cease-fires. As soon as the firing stopped, they went back to their despicable practice of sending mass text messages about special sales and offers to the private phones of innocent civilians.
The practice earned itself an even more negative reputation after Hamas adopted the exact same tactic during the war, sending text messages to countless Israelis as part of an intimidation campaign. Among the threats Israelis received were dire warnings that “We will bomb everywhere in Israel,” if the Israelis don’t “get out of their land.”
The speed and impertinence with which advertisers rushed back to this particularly unpopular marketing strategy made it perfectly obvious why some Israeli consumers felt a need to wreak their revenge on those companies shortly before the war. This was expressed in a wave of “text protests.” Huge groups of people worked together to flood the phone of some specific person or other with text messages, to get back at them for whatever it was that infuriated the public in the first place.
One of the victims was Herzl Ozer, chairman of the Israeli telecommunication company Hot. A client of the company who had suspended his service at the beginning of the year, had been contacted on countless occasions by various representatives of the company, all trying to win him back. Sometimes they contacted him several times in a single day. Finally, he decided to reciprocate using the same method. The client, Eliran Ben Haim, obtained Ozer’s personal phone number, and sent it to his friends, along with an emotional plea, asking them to help him harass Ozer. “I need your help,” Ben Haim wrote on his Facebook page. “Please text him.” The response was forthcoming. Ozer received so many text messages that he was forced to change his phone number.
AL-MONITOR All-Access gives you unlimited access to all our journalism, the full Daily Briefing, exclusive interviews, premium newsletters, and live events — for less than $2/week.
