Why my signs matter

You may think I'm overly obsessing about my stickers and banners. Maybe I am. But it's because this is part of a bigger, scary trend. You won't believe what just became illegal in Israel...

Okay, I may be obsessing.

I not only spent my time this week trying for the FIFTH TIME to hang up a Standing Together sign outside my garden calling for peace and shared society hoping that this time it WON’T get ripped down. I ALSO took the time to photograph my efforts and post them here and across my social media feeds and hearing from other people who have had similar experiences. I am also considering getting a nanny cam because, well, I need to protect my signs! Also, I want to know who’s doing it. And if I get a photo or clip of the person ripping down signs calling for peace, you can be sure I will make that public. Stay tuned…

For the fifth time, putting up a Standing Together sign outside my house

A previous sign that was cut down, reads “Yes, peace” in Hebrew and Arabic

But at this point, you may be thinking, “Hey, Elana don’t you think this is a bit MUCH? They are just signs!”

I hear you. And maybe it DOES feel like a bit much. But these are not “just” signs. This is a battle for the consciousness of the nation. And that consciousness has life and death consequences. Whether we are able to get this government to stop bombarding the hell out of Gaza and to make hostage return top priority — that may have a lot to do with whether the people exert enough pressure on the government for this to happen. Maybe.

Earlier this year, standing at an intersection with my sign, “Bring them home, ceasefire now”. This sign has some miles on it….

The signs matter. Because the government is, apparently, scared of them.

How do we know for sure that the government is scared of the power of signs? Because this week, the government instructed the police to take down signs of dead children in Gaza. And then declared that holding signs of death in Gaza is illegal in Israel. Watch Alon Lee-Green of Standing Together describe what’s been happening.

Although the police later backtracked on this, many protesters are still reeling from the impacts. Several groups are planning to increase their use of posters with images of the violence in Gaza, Standing Together started a new campaign to put photos of children on buses and an accompanying protest on Thursday, and for the first time there is a real public outcry in Israel about the practices of ignoring or silencing the pains and experiences of Palestinians.

The new Standing Together campaign to end the war. “18,000 children have been killed by bombings in Gaza. Refusing the war — Thursday at Habima Square 19:30.” With photos of babies and chidlren who have been killed.

The silencing of anti-violence and anti-war protest is not new in Israel. I would argue that for decades, the silencing of these voices has taken place in sometimes subtle ways. In fact, there are many ways in which the Israeli media and government prevent Israelis from seeing and hearing about the real lives of Palestinians, especially the deadly impact of Israeli actions. Stories about killings in Gaza and the West Bank rarely make it into the Israeli news (except for Ha’aretz and 972), unless there is international pressure. And even then, the stories are usually accompanied by IDF narratives that try to spin the killing of babies as self-defense or about Hamas terrorists. Sometimes the death of Palestinians doesn’t even count as the death of a human being. Like, you might read a story with a headline such as, “IDF prevents terror attack, no injuries,” and then discover later in the article that the so-called “terrorist” is dead. That death often doesn’t even count as a death. Plus, that “terrorist” may be a 10 year old holding a rock. Or a woman crossing a checkpoint who was deemed “suspicious”. We often don’t know exactly what turns a person into a “terrorist” who automatically deserves to die, but we accept that IDF version that if they say a person deserves to die, then that’s it. Once a person is labeled “terrorist”, no matter what they did to get that designation, their life no longer matters. They don’t even count as being a person. Their death is called “neutralizing” or “purifying the scene”. That’s how Israelis are trained to think about the killing of Palestinians. They are not real people and they deserve to die, and Israelis tend to just nod along with it and go back to their hummus.

These dynamics of dehumanization spill into every life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people defend Israel’s killing of babies by saying, “Well, they are Hamas supporters.” I’m like, BABIES???!!! My head hurts from these exchanges. And they are rooted in this very concerted effort by the powers that be to inject our brains with rhetoric justifying the unjustifiable.

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The practice of controlling language in order to control what we think is not new. But it’s being coopted in today’s political culture in new and sometimes terrifying ways. The police violently taking down posters of dead Gazan children is just one. The recent IDF raids on a Palestinian bookstore in east Jerusalem is another. The attack on books has been a growing problem in the US for a while, with an estimated 100,000 book bans over the 2023-2024 school year.

If words weren’t powerful, the fascists wouldn’t be working so hard to silence them.

The trump regime’s attack on universities is also an attempt to prevent certain words and ideas from having power. Liberal and progressive ideas that emerge from many college campuses have been seen as a threat that needs to be “neutralized” by many conservative and neo-fascist leaders for a while. Only now, trump is using new tools towards that aim. Student deportations, student detentions, college defunding, and threats of closure — all result from new uses of force in order to shut down the flow of ideas.

The trump/netanyahu world view is working overtime to legitimize violence as a means to gain their own power. They are trying to use violence to erase words and ideas.

Indeed, I think that one of trump’s biggest cultural impacts is this — the idea that force and violence are legitimate tools for getting what you want.

Trump is the cheater-in-chief. He has been willing to use illegal force in everything he does in order to get his way — from cheating the election system in order to ensure he gets elected, to cheating the immigration system in order to remove people he wants removed, to forcing the entire Congress to comply with everything from tariffs to judicial appointments to funding for his friends. He bullies, pushes, lies, and violently forces his way.

The conservative/neo-fascist hatred of liberal ideas is not new. What is new is the escalation of tools of violence in order to silence ideas. What’s new is that the use of force to silence ideas has become legitimized in many people’s minds. That’s the trump/bibi effect.

This violence has become the norm. And people around the world are watching and taking notes.

Bibi Netanyahu is certainly watching and learning. Arresting people for social media posts. Educators fired for expressing sympathy with children in Gaza. It’s systemic at this point. Ronen Bar told the Supreme Court this week about Bibi’s insistent demand to silence protesters. It’s about violently quashing opposition in any ways possible, Trump and Bibi using the same playbook of violence to get your way. Instead of viewing the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Israel as legitimate voices and equal members of society in a functioning democracy, Netanyahu has done everything he could to forcefully stop the protests and bulldoze his way through his plans. And his plans, by the way, are to eliminate vital structures of democracy. And also, to powerfully ignore human rights and voices calling for an end to unjust killings.

All these things are connected. Violently silence opposing voices in order to be able to carry out further violence without interruption.

All these things are connected.

So when I discover that random people passing by my house think that it’s okay to pull down my posters calling for peace and shared society — over and over again — I know that they think that this is a legitimate thing to do because their leader does the same thing. They think it’s their job somehow to make sure that ideas about peace do not get seen.

It’s actually validating in a way to know that they think the signs matter. Clearly they DO matter.

And it’s also motivating for me to keep putting them up. To keep at it. To keep sharing these ideas as much as I can in all ways that I can.

It matters.

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