Published: 18 August 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FRIDAY, 4PM. It’s as humid as a Turkish bath and hot as Hades. Clothes are soaked with sweat in the sticky air. Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, usually packed at this hour, is deserted. Anyone who can is currently sprawling next to an air-conditioner, waiting for the sun to set before venturing outside.
Except for six intrepid women with heavy French accents who gathered at the corner of Allenby and Lilienblum Street, armed with buckets, paintbrushes and stacks of A4 paper. Meet “HaStickeriot” – the “sticker women.”
For the past month and a half they’ve been putting up messages to draw attention to violence against women. The idea was imported from France, based on the movement called Collages Féminicides, established by Marguerite Stern. The trend has also reached Germany, England, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and even Latakia, Syria.
First stop: a wall near the street corner. While three of the women stick up pages they prepared ahead of time (each white page is printed with a large black letter) to spell out the chilling sentence: “Dad murdered Mom,” Ilana, a 36-year-old writer and doctoral student in sociology who emigrated to Israel 10 years ago, tells how it all began.
“I’m in Paris a lot for my doctoral work and that’s where I became aware of the movement,” she says. “Wherever you go there, you see these messages. At first they were just 15 women and now there are 3,000 women in Paris alone. It’s huge. There are cells in all the big cities in France, and it spread all over Europe.”
FULL STORY The Israeli anti-femicide women who stick it to violent men (Haaretz)
Photo: The members of the 'Sticker Women' group ('HaStickeriot') in Tel Aviv, August. The sticker behind them reads: 'He raped me, I am not imagining.' (Ofer Vaknin)
