Bumper Sticker BattlesI came back from my summer in Israel in 1995 with quite a few bumper stickers expressing right-wing sentiments. These bumper stickers had become very popular in Israel, at least in Jerusalem. They had slogans like "This peace is killing us", "a bloody peace", "Israel rejects Rabin", and old favorite, "The nation is with the Golan." Some had more extreme slogans, but I did not accept those bumper stickers.
When I arrived home, I promptly and proudly put the stickers on my car's bumper. One popular bumper sticker that I would not put on my car expressed the feeling that "Yesha [Judea, Samaria and Gaza] is here." I liked that slogan very much, but, I reasoned to others in the U.S. who placed that sticker on their bumper, the slogan was one that only made sense in Israel and was absurd in New York City.
Around a month after I came home, my car was totaled in a car accident. It remained in the driveway for a rather long time before I got around to donating the scraps to a charitable organization.
On November 4, 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was murdered. On Monday morning, November 6, 1995, while leaving my parents' house, I noticed all the bumper stickers on my totaled Ford Tempo. I was concerned that after the assassination, they would unnecessarily offend, or be taken by passers-by as support for Yigal Amir's crime.
Also, for the first time, the bumper stickers then looked ridiculous to me, the same way that American Jews wearing orange wristbands and putting orange ribbons on their cars seemed ridiculous to me this past summer. So I painstakingly scraped all of the stickers off the car.
posted on 11/01/2005
