The ‘Sticker Song’ versus sticker discord

Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis—Here they come. Names marching toward the war to come.

Colonialism, settler colonialism, – Stick the label on the wall. Stick it on the blackboard, stick it on them all.

Apartheid, genocide, nakba, resistance—one word, two words, three words, or four: battlefield losses yet words win the war.

In 2004, David Grossman wrote lyrics for a hit recorded by Hadag Nachash, one of Israel’s leading rap groups. With fifty-four car bumper stickers, David Grossman puts on display the irreconcilable verbal markers of the passionate political debates that not only define the diverse core identities of the country’s citizens, but which also shape the radically varied ways in which they see the world.

The question is whether the slogans shouted by Hamas promoters constitute a contemporary version of the sticker song. And to what extent can the twisting narrative threads of the Sticker Song unravel the aims embedded in jingles that have captured headlines, launched demonstrations, and polarized elections. Deploying the David Grossman rap to clarify the meaning of the slogans seizing so much airtime is admittedly an unusual way to unravel how and why events in the Middle East have become so central across the globe. But the very intellectual sites—that is, the colleges and universities with world-wide reputations–where it would be natural to turn for enlightenment on these topics are no longer places of energetic intellectual inquiry, particularly about Israel and the Middle East. Genuine academic rigor in the social sciences and humanities on these subjects has been so degraded, if not asphyxiated, that when it occurs, it takes place hidden behind closed doors, shunted aside by student and faculty activists parading their progressive credentials. The propensity to banish or distort genuine scholarship now stifles dissent in the classroom, surrendering the commitment to understanding the world in favor of a presumed dedication to changing it.

For that reason and unsurprisingly, Hamas’ October 7 barbarism won the movement a revolutionary legitimacy with people across the globe pledging loyalty to the glory of the Palestinian cause. The scale of backing for Hamas savagery cast the Middle East Conflict from its conventional territorial orbit into an apocalyptic realm with the words ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. For Hamas’ carnage aimed not at echoing the past injustices of 1948 but rather at highlighting how one might undo them by destroying the legitimacy of a Jewish state, if not actually deleting the country’s borders and name from the map. Becoming viral, incantations of purported crimes are chanted as they are marched through institutions across cities and towns in Europe and America. ‘Globalizing the intifada,’ as much a fashion statement as a social movement, is now curated as the essential marker of progressive identity and of cleansing the world of injustice whatever its manifestation. Palestinians have become fetishized as the Platonic ideal of innocent victims.

October 7 atrocities must be understood not only as acts of violence but as attempts to resurrect an archaic myth—that history’s errors can be undone through bloodshed. For Hamas, slaughtering Israeli civilians was not merely a military strategy but rather a redemptive ritual, a symbolic undoing of 1948.

This is the mimetic quality of today’s radical politics: one cause bleeds into another until all are absorbed into a single, protean faith. Less a doctrine than a style of believing, it provides what might be called a “religious or cultic experience,” binding together disparate grievances through the sheer energy of performance. In this sense, Palestine functions less as a political project than as a stage and pulpit upon which global discontents enact their fantasies of revolution. Repeating the slogans is intended to breathe life into words transubstantiated into imaginary visions of liberation.

This approach has radiated its power outward to assault the cultural and political institutions around which educated elites orbit presumably because of some daisy-chain connection to Israel. The links—and targets of protests– increasingly have turned out to consist of Jews employed or associated with these organizations. Because the Jewish state and the Zionism responsible for its founding have become metaphors for global evil and injustice, the contemporary memes denouncing Zionism quickly retrieved the antisemitic fables of past ages. Antisemitism blended with Antizionism adds a frightening potency to the onslaughts.

A recent survey lays bare the dimensions of this phenomenon. Examining 1,136 US colleges offering programs in Jewish, Israel, Hebrew, and Holocaust Studies between May 2021-Spring 2026, 4 out of ten faculties have signed anti-Israel petitions. Included among the anti-Israel professors are fourteen endowed chair holders. At Ivy League colleges 72.3 % of Jewish Studies teachers have publicly denounced Israel. Columbia University has seventy-seven faculty members calling for boycotts or divestment. The university sponsored twenty-seven events accompanied by faculty and staff statements backing the Hamas October 7 atrocities. Five university departments signed on to boycott their Israeli peers. At NYU, 148 faculty back boycotts. Among them are distinguished academicians—winners of Guggenheim Fellowships whose books on various aspects of Jewish history have won awards.

The academy has conjured up a fictional Israel supposedly waging a campaign of genocide and following an often hidden settler colonialist script mandating the displacement of what are called the native and righteous Palestinian population. Palestinians have no choice but to engage in resistance. They are forced by displacement and oppression to embrace violence.

Israel has been transformed into a symbol of such cosmic evil that it is now the axis around which disparate progressive causes revolve. Demonstrators chanting for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” weave together environmental activism, labor agitation, and transgender rights in thrall to the idea that solidarity with Palestinians will be the pathway to creating a truly just world for all. The connection between these causes is not grounded in strategy or policy but in performance—a theatrical Marxism in which donning a keffiyeh substitutes for careful argument, and loathing Israel confers instant credibility as a cultural insurgent. The Palestinian narrative is perfectly calibrated for the contemporary culture wars spurring Hamas supporters to transport their goal to ‘globalize the Intifada’ into a vision of radical change in America that will transform the country’s institutions and norms.

Anti-American hatred flows from a narrative not simply filled with contempt for Israel but also full of historical and political distortions. Words like settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, resistance are repeated because they bring together what is presumed the sordid histories for which both nations should feel remorse. Emblazing them at the forefront of the Palestinian cause is intended to make Israeli and American experiences synchronize. The words are intended to lure people into believing a serious ethic and history can be tapped out in incantations however seductive the beat. But the politics, ethics and history shouted out are problematic. Nor can mere repetition confer legitimacy on concepts not emerging from an accurate accounting of the past.

Take, for example, the Arab Revolt in 1936, summoning the furies of Palestinian peasants. After a decade of Jewish immigration and land purchases during British rule, which came despite Palestinian opposition. Arabs in Palestine, including those from other countries, began attacking Jews and British forces.

Brutal British counterinsurgency measures ended the uprising, but not before scores of peasant villagers struck and even occupied urban centers. By the end of the revolt, the Palestine problem was stitched into the broader ambitions for Arab national unity. Erasing the lines between nation and region generated aspirations that were both unrealistic and self-destructive for all who subscribed to them.

This “all-or-nothing strategy” catalyzed into a sacred formula held in reverence and passed from one generation to another. The outrage and opposition to the UN Partition Plan in 1947 were anchored in this principle.

These same protean forces shadowed the Oslo Accords and caused their failure by replacing years of painstaking negotiations with prolonged violence. If the first intifada helped precipitate the 1990s’ peace process, the second one lionized exploding bombs on municipal buses or in pubs where teenagers gathered to dance, thwarting what had become a significant program for state-building.

By evangelizing martyrdom, Palestinians and their supporters have built a national culture on grievance and victimhood, paying homage to the 1948 nakba (Arabic for the “disaster” of the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel) fixated on the failures of the past that demand restitution if not redemption.

Palestinians are victims of a strategic doctrine so rigidly upheld that it rules out the kinds of calculations and compromises countries normally engage in when they are building states. Left in thrall to a violence that curates their deaths as sacred, perpetual destruction and loss become self-fulfilling prophecies.

To return to David Grossman’s “Sticker Song” is to remember that bringing the volatile language of Israeli politics to the surface was intended to underline the need to wrestle with the discomfort of the country’s shortcomings not to abandon the Zionist project whose core principle was that ordinary people can change history.

Zionism’s greatest success—the establishment of a state in 1948—came not from the imaginative potency of its messianic myths but rather from its capacity to set priorities and to adhere to a timetable that had international resonance and produced significant global support. No one said it better than Natan Alterman in his poem —על אם הדרך- [At the Crossroad] 1947 was a crossroad for Zionism, and at that juncture, Zionist leaders had to calculate not only what needed to be done but also, and perhaps more importantly, what could be done.

Zionism appeared at a time when Jews were full of doubts about how to cope with the multiple crises they faced. Faced with the possibility of disintegration, Zionism developed surrounded by disagreements that now sound less like a dispatch from another century than a mirror of the landscape inhabited today.

Amid this turmoil, Zionism evolved into a force brimming with intellectual ferment and replete with arguments over values, policies, and priorities. Its development is a virtual template for the hysteria of today, an insight that can diminish the distance between then and now. Zionism’s language is so full of moral questions and so rich with concrete calculations that it could only have emerged through debate and argument. And because economics and politics formed the physical and cultural parameters of Jewish existence, Zionist strategies could not turn exclusively on idiosyncratic cultural or religious values, for considerations of the available options could never be avoided.

The essential original Zionist claim was not that Jewish nation building was unique but rather that Jews possessed a unique way of being a nation because Zionism joined its political struggle to noble ambitions that might never be fulfilled but should never be forgotten or discarded. Citizenship in this reading of Zionism embodied a series of obligations, and among them was the imperative to live up to the country’s founding principles. For only Zionism would enable the Jewish people to take advantage of the modern world without losing their collective or national distinctiveness.

On the one hand are social activists gripped by the myths propagated by slogans, and on the other, a series of stickers reminding Israelis of the ideals proclaimed at the founding of their state. Only when failures to meet these ideals are fully acknowledged can the work of building a future that is better than the past or the present begin. And if not now, then tomorrow, so that the next generation can live without the constant threat of war, and with no need for a bumper sticker to make it home through traffic.