STUCK.

I am at war with someone in my neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, I was standing in front of the bar talking with my friend when he pointed to a spot behind my head.

An Israeli flag.

Where?!

I whipped my head around not sure what I expected to see. There it was. On the phone pole that hems in our property. A small blue and white sticker with a star in the middle, the size of two postage stamps.

Ughhhhh.

I groaned loudly, reached up the pole to a height just above my head, and scratched the sticker off with my thin fingernail tips. The removal felt good.

Since then, I’ve noticed these same stickers all along the same length of street from just in front of the bar and down several blocks of Washington and Greenwich as you head south. They usually stop around Christopher Street. I see them on telephone poles and street signs, parking meters and phone boxes. Anywhere with a flat surface along the sidewalk. It’s a route I go along pretty frequently because it’s part of my neighborhood. Where I have lived and worked for over two decades. It’s been my home for most of my life.

Now, it is my daily mission to tear these stickers down, especially the ones in front of the bar. They are slapped on haphazardly, as though the person doing it is in a hurry. For the most part they come off pretty easily because they haven’t been applied with enough pressure to fully adhere. It’s very satisfying when I can peel them off the surface they are on and leave no mark behind. Like they never existed.

Sometimes, when I assume the bandit had more time to affix it, I will encounter a sticker that requires a bit more effort to remove. I’ll scratch at it’s edges for as long as I can and try to leave behind as little of the image as possible. One got stuck so firmly on the pole in front of the bar that I couldn’t get it off, only the outermost edges of dark blue would cede to the flimsy tips of my useless talons. I rummaged through the supply closet where we store all the tools one needs to keep bar equipment running and searched for a scraper of some sort. Instead I found a square of sandpaper.

I rubbed every remnant of the sticker off the aluminum pole so ferociously that I scraped the skin on my pointer finger knuckle off and it bled. I sucked on my finger and tasted the iron.

Lately, I’ve been riding my bike again. I stopped for a while after my friend got in a bad accident on his Citibike. He got doored by a car that pushed him into another car and totally fucked up his leg, and it required three surgeries. His meniscus was pushed to the back of his knee and now he has metal pins in his shin. He has to do physical therapy indefinitely and walks with a limp. When it rains, he complains about the pain.

I used to be quite reckless on my bicycle, and before that on a longboard. Hurtling through the city streets, ignoring red lights and weaving through traffic. I’m more cautious with my body now, and not just because of my friend’s accident. I don’t think I’m afraid I will die. I’m more afraid something terrible will happen and I’ll live. Brain damage or a lost appendage. A difficult trial to overcome. Pain to endure that could have been avoided. An accident that would require tenacity I’m not sure I have.

Since my war with the sticker hanger began, I started riding my bicycle again along the route that they frequent in my neighborhood. I feel safer doing the unsticking on my bike because it makes me feel like I can get away quickly if I need to. It is possible they are tagging other areas, but I feel personally responsible for where I abide. The streets that are my home will not be marred by these symbols of genocidal occupiers.

Whoever is putting the stickers up seems to know it’s annoying to me because as often as I take them down, they keep putting them back up. I peddle my bike slowly down Washington Street; the Freedom Tower shimmers in the distance as I work. My pace is deliberate so I can see every pole surface, front and back, while simultaneously keeping the traffic in my peripheral view.

I know what I am doing doesn’t really matter. That it’s not going to change anything about what is happening in Gaza. But it gives me the tiniest sense of fleeting peace. Someday, when Palestine is free, I can know that I never accepted these little pasted symbols as normal and harmless. I refused to be cowed into an indifference towards the cruelty they represent.

Today, one of the traffic boxes was covered in them. I violently ripped them off and wadded them into a ball in my hand. A man with his phone to his ear stood in the doorway of a closed restaurant and watched me. He didn’t register an expression on his face. I doubt he even realized what I was doing.

I keep waiting for someone to confront me while I’m doing my daily flag sticker removal throughout the neighborhood. There will be a slight tremble in my stomach as I imagine being confronted by someone on the street. Will they call me an antisemite or accuse me of being Hamas? Will I retort with the intelligent, measured response I practice in the mirror when I have imaginary fights with Zionists alone in my apartment? Or will I just do what I usually do when confronted by assholes and tell them to fuck off?

I am worried even to post this. Even though hardly anyone reads my writing here. My mind plays a reel of outcomes in which this tiny act of protest is used as proof that I hate Jews somehow. Even though many of the people who share my anger are also Jews. Even though most polls show that a majority of people want a ceasefire. And most intelligent people understand that the root of evil here is the colonizer Zionist project actively working to eradicate Palestinians from existence. And that America funds not just the Israeli state’s evil ethnic cleansing but also provides them enough funding that allows them to have free healthcare and education with our tax dollars. That we have built a police training ground there for our own officers to learn brutal and inhuman techniques to be perpetrated on black and brown Americans here and that we are replicating these models in Cop Cities across this country.

If there is someone out there determined enough to keep putting these fucking flag stickers up every day, there must also be people living in the area who feel the same way as them. Sure, it’s a progressive and artsy neighborhood. But it’s also a high-income bracket area and rich people have the luxury of ignoring things in the world that don’t directly affect their comfortable lives. Maybe they believe that what is happening is just normal war and not vicious genocide

.

Every time I remove a sticker, I look around to see if anyone has seen what I’ve done. I’ve met eyes with a few people hoping they’ll give me a nod of approval or say Free Palestine! We’ll bump fists and talk about how fucked up and horrible it all is. And I won’t feel as crazy as I do. A mad woman roving the far West Village acting out performative sticker removal because she feels helpless and frustrated.

What I suspect is probably closer to the truth is that most people just go about their days and don’t think about Palestine as much as I do. Or they know that it’s terrible but feel that whatever is happening in their own universe requires too much attention for them to relinquish any mental energy to something that seems inevitable. I don’t blame them. It feels like walking through filthy air with a gaping open wound covering your entire body.  

Sometimes, the stickers are placed too far from my reach, and I have to climb up on the base of the pole to reach them. I’ve even started carrying a wooden stool out of the bar to help me reach the ones placed well beyond my arm’s length even if I climb. There are a few that have been placed so high it makes me wonder if my sticker nemesis has a ladder or if they are just really tall and able to jump higher than my body would ever permit.

I saw one today that was so high up on the back of a street sign that I felt an actual sense of defeat. I actually waited for a few minutes to see if someone very tall and compassionate looking would walk by who could help me. No one walked by that fit the description, but even if someone did, I don’t know if I would have been able to ask. It would require me to be vulnerable in a weird way. To have a conversation that could go in so many different ways that I wouldn’t necessarily be prepared for. It would be a reminder that not everyone is in my head all the time. Hearing the screams of children who have seen their families disintegrate into flames. Feeling like I am scratching at a wall trying to find a door but knowing that behind the door is just another wall.