I am an American, so I have grown up with American bumper stickers. Once upon a time, they were earnest: “COEXIST.” “A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.” More recently, American bumper stickers have gravitated toward the absurd and ironic: “PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE IS ANYTHING I CAN DO TO MAKE YOUR TAILGATING MORE ENJOYABLE.” “DRIVING SCARES ME TOO.” “NOPE NOT ADULTING TODAY.” And the vaguely aggressive: “SPOILER ALERT: I DON’T CARE.” “I SPEAK FLUENT SARCASM.” “EVERYTHING IS A CONSIPRACY WHEN YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW ANYTHING WORKS.”
Bumper stickers haven’t been around forever. Post-World War II technological advancements in adhesives enabled people to attach sticky paper to cars initially for the purposes of tourism. But the real turn in popularity came during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential campaign with “I LIKE IKE,” a slogan that was compelling and witty and took up very little room. Decades later, the bumper sticker is still doing some of the same political work in the United States.
But as anyone who has traveled knows, the bumper sticker phenom has been exported to many other shores. One of those countries is Israel, where bumper stickers may be even more ubiquitous than they are here. Today, as the war in Israel is inching closer to 500 days, bumper stickers have become a strange, new cultural expression, especially among the Gen Z population. They have become personalized death notices, mostly of soldiers, that appear on lampposts, elevator walls, and bus stops all over Israel’s cities and are proliferating like mushrooms after rain. Most are the size of regular car bumper stickers. Others are smaller or unusually shaped. They are woefully unironic. The only absurdity they communicate is that of war itself.
Almost all of them have a photo, usually the beaming or pensive face of a young man or woman who has died in the past year and a half. On the sticker is the name of the dead, often the military unit and branch, the date of death and the name of the war, sometimes with the Hebrew words, “YOU ARE OUR HERO” or “YOU ARE LOVED” or “YOU ARE TERRIBLY MISSED.” Despite the thick pain in Israel since October 7, someone memorialized a brother, a son, or a friend for his “FAITH IN HUMANITY,” a belief that might be strained among those who now mourn him. One white bumper sticker in script font reads, “YOU WILL ALWAYS BE A HERO TO YOUR MOTHER.” Another says: “THERE IS A HOLE IN MY HEART THE SHAPE OF YOU.”
Once upon a time, bumper stickers were pious.
Some stickers show hostages—men, women and children—whose faces also line airport corridors, restaurant windows, and apartment balconies. Many say, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU,” and are there to ask pedestrians to remember them and seek their release, as if to say that a nation cannot be whole without their return. These bumper stickers do not speak to anyone’s political affiliation—if they support or reject the current government—they speak only of service.
People walk by these sticker stations quickly. I linger. It feels disrespectful to the dead to walk by these sticker banks rushing to school, work, or the gym. And notwithstanding the aggressive way many Israelis drive or the creative way they park, no one, I noticed, places one sticker over another or even overlaps them. Each gets its own parking space. Unique in life, unique in death. Sticker etiquette demands the dead inhabit both the solemnity and quiet of the cemetery and the noise and bustle of a city square. Here there is no rage. No anger. No fury. Just a gentle wash of sadness.
Sometimes the soldiers on these stickers are in uniform, to emphasize their service to the country. Others are remembered in civilian clothes, painting, dancing, enjoying a game of soccer, or playing an instrument. Not every face is that of a person in his or her twenties. There are those in their forties and fifties who were killed while on reserve duty. “TO DAD, THANK YOU,” reads one produced by a child to remember a dead parent. The English is four words. The Hebrew is two: Todah, Abba. Hebrew is a simple language of words that become other words with the addition of a letter or two that can be deconstructed to a simple three letter root. The language is like its people: deep, connected, and to the point.
But the most salient feature of this new sticker revolution is that almost every single one contains a quotation, not usually a direct citation but something that sums up the way that person lived. “IF YOU DO GOOD, YOU WILL MERIT GOOD,” states one about a soldier who clearly deserved better. “WITH DEEDS, NOT WITH WORDS,” could be a dedication to a quiet young man, distinguished by what he did rather than by what he said.
Sometimes the saying suggests the military philosophy of the dead soldier: “WE HAVE NO OTHER COUNTRY. NOW IT’S MY TURN TO PROTECT IT.” Or “IT IS VERY GOOD TO LIVE FOR ONE’S COUNTRY,” a riff off the popular and oft-cited, oft-criticized statement allegedly made by the early Zionist Joseph Trumpeldor with his last breath, when he was killed defending a Jewish settlement in the Galilee in 1920: “IT IS GOOD TO DIE FOR ONE’S COUNTRY.”
Other stickers are didactic: “DO GOOD FOR ANOTHER” or “DON’T PUT OFF TO TOMORROW WHAT CAN BE DONE TODAY” or “LIVE TODAY AS IF THERE IS NO TOMORROW.” If only he had more time. If only we had another day with her. “BE AUTHENTIC. BE THAT WAY ALWAYS.”
I don’t know who puts these stickers up or who produces them. Do families and friends have them printed in the hundreds or the thousands? How long after the news hits do they generally appear? Do carloads of people travel the country or dispense them on neighborhood walls in the dead of night? Is this the death equivalent of locks on European bridges to fortify a memory rather than a romance? No one in Israel speaks of the damage to public property, perhaps because these faces have become public property. These young men and women are grieved by those who love them and by those who have never met them.
The thing about stickers is not only what’s on the front but also the adhesive on the back. I still see an occasional car or two with a bumper sticker from a political race long decided. The sticker sometimes looks better than the car. When the adhesive outlasts the politicians and the causes, we find something else to put on top until the arduous work of removal takes place before the car is put up for sale. But when the stickers honor the lives of so many young people, no one will rush to remove them. The stickers will stay.
Do families and friends have them printed in the hundreds or the thousands?
I am not sure how to manage the bite-sized emotional whiplash of being on the road in one country and then another within less than twenty-four hours. In America, the car rhetoric is too sardonic and caustic for me. I make no judgment of those who create or buy bumper stickers. The stickers are the product of a generation who have inherited a world of wars, climate battles, and natural disasters, who don’t want to hear any more nonsense about “TIKKUN OLAM,” when the aging and narcissistic politicians running the world don’t seem to care. Truthiness has replaced facts; inspiration and sincerity have been repurposed into the insulating protection of dark humor. These young people are not wrong. They are rightly anxious about Social Security, housing, and health-care costs, and feel uncertain they will ever have what their parents worked for. The bumper sticker provides a little psychic relief in this bleak, unchartered terrain.
But Israeli young men and women aren’t offered the chance to “not adult today,” when that day is spent avoiding explosions in Gaza or walking gingerly through rubble or tunnels in search of terrorists. The prolonged violence will shape generations on both sides. The rebuilding will be the work of decades. Everyone knows someone who has died in this war, and it has softened, traumatized, and scarred a population whose hearts have come undone.
In 2023, in the World Happiness Report, Israel was ranked as the fourth-happiest country on the planet, right after a flotilla of cold Nordic countries. The United States is ranked twenty-third. Lebanon, a stone’s throw away, is 139 out of 140. The six measures in the index include the GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and control of corruption. There is much to say about each of these factors and how they reflect Israel’s social fabric, especially the last. Be that as it may, in 2024, after hundreds of days of war, Israel did go down in the rankings. It moved from four to five.
How’s that for irony?
Unlike the concerns of a young generation of Americans, health care and education are rights in Israel, not privileges. Housing in Israel is alarmingly expensive, to be sure, but the bonds of national service and constant war have brought people together so that the anguish on bumper stickers is natural and expected. It reflects social cohesion, a sense of purpose, resilience, generosity, and meaning that contribute to communal flourishing, despite the hostility across the Middle East.
Thanks to Jeffrey Weiss, a lawyer who immigrated from Washington D.C. to Tel Aviv, I can now pay tribute to those who have died; his website, Stickers of Meaning, is a new virtual repository of these stickers, accompanied by brief biographies in Hebrew and in English “making them and the powerful messages they carry accessible to as many people as possible.” These stickers are not designed to amuse or distract. They do not reflect a generation’s apathy, indifference, disgust or ennui. Instead, they’ve been thoughtfully collected to help “build a world filled with love, purpose, and accomplishment.”
These sentiments spelled out on small sticky scraps have become the wallpaper of a nation unafraid to tell the rest of us what to live for. Charles Schultz once said, “There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.” But in Israel not always. The good citizen in me still worries about the mess and the vandalization of public property. But the human being in me understands that tough Israeli exteriors are there to protect deep vulnerabilities that sometimes show up in the least likely spaces.