The Campaign at a Bus Stop
There is a bus stop on Route 60, about fifteen kilometres south of Yerushalayim, below the town of Neve Daniel. I don't think buses even stop there any more.
As a relic from the not too distant past - there have been drive-by murders on this stretch of road - this bus stop is particularly well fortified, providing abundant hanging space for posters. In fact the structure, standing in front of the vineyards, has become an unlikely "billboard".
During 2005 the bus stop was used for many posters relating to Gush Katif and the impending "Disengagement". Initially these took the form of announcements of rallies and marches. In time the posters became increasingly political. There were no new posters in the last two weeks of the campaign. Perhaps the poster hangers had all moved, along with many thousands of others, to the towns and villages that were to be evacuated, or perhaps the poster producers had run out of resources.
The "poster culture" in Israel is an interesting phenomenon. Poster designers use their talents to inform, protest and educate. Posters provide a cheap mechanism for getting a message to a wide audience. They allow things to be said that may be unacceptable in other media for ethical, social or legal reasons. They empower the disenfranchised.
The photographs of the bus stop on the following pages demonstrate the power, politics and artistry of poster campaigns and presents a history of the anti-disengagement or, as the posters would call it, the anti-expulsion, period.
The bus stop in situ
The posters did return to the bus stop.
But then one fine day . . . they took my bus stop away :-(
They blamed it on security. They didn't want people catching buses on the highway or something similar. Easier to take
away the bus stop than to worry about the security situation.
You can view the original, pre-Expulsion Collection,
as well as later photographs of the bus stop.
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