Nissi Peli
+972 Magazine / November 12, 2025
From lampposts to café windows, portraits of fallen soldiers have saturated public space, binding personal loss to a drive for ‘total victory’ in Gaza.
Each spring, three of Israel’s most significant non-religious national holidays unfold over the course of a single week: Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism), and finally, Independence Day. The sequence conveys a clear national story: Jews were slaughtered because they lacked a state; they triumphed by building military power; and the lives sacrificed to establish and defend that state — and the Jewish collective itself — are what give it meaning.
This narrative of transformation, from helpless victimhood to militarized citizenship, is instilled early. In Israeli schools, students learn of Zionist hero Joseph Trumpledor’s supposed last words — “It’s good to die for your country” — and stage annual Remembrance Day ceremonies honouring fallen soldiers. Nearly every eleventh grader travels to the sites of Nazi concentration camps in Poland on school trips, just as they begin the military screening process.
The Hamas-led attack of October 7 and the subsequent multi-front war fit seamlessly into this logic. In Israeli media and politics, the assault was repeatedly described as a “pogrom,” echoing imagery of Jewish defenselessness before and during the Holocaust. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invoked the comparison time and again, calling it “the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.”
This logic found visual expression in the first few weeks of the war. On the “home front,” Israelis have been bombarded with symbols and slogans aimed at mobilizing them for the war effort — a campaign waged by both the state and the private sector. Billboards, balconies, product packaging, and even bus announcements have been saturated with an unending sea of flags, tributes to the “heroes” of Israel’s security forces, and the ubiquitous slogan: “Together we will win.” Elite, Israel’s oldest coffee company, even renamed its “Turkish Coffee” to “Together We Will Win Coffee,” after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced support for the Palestinians.
But almost as soon as the first bombs fell on Gaza, a different, bottom-up visual culture began to spread across Israel’s streets. Images of young Israelis — mostly soldiers, but also smiling partygoers — started appearing on bus stops, lampposts, train platforms, vending machines, café windows, and car trunks. These were privately printed “memorial stickers,” created by families, friends, and comrades of the dead — a spontaneous, grassroots effort to honor and publicize their loss.
As the Israeli army’s ground offensive in Gaza deepened and the number of dead soldiers grew, the phenomenon accelerated, and soon took on a standardized form. Most stickers feature a portrait: a smiling soldier in uniform, often holding a rifle or framed against a bright sky or desert landscape. Many bear unit insignia, the Israeli flag, or the “Iron Swords War” logo.
Beneath each name, one Hebrew epitaph appears again and again: HYD — “May God avenge his blood.” Historically used to honor Jews killed because they were Jewish, the phrase was popularized in Israel during the war. Netanyahu, for example, invoked it after announcing the deaths of hostages Oded Lifshitz and the Bibas children.
The stickers usually include a quote or phrase aiming to capture the spirit of the deceased individual. Some lean religious — a verse from Psalms, a reference to Jerusalem, a line about sanctifying God’s name in death. Others reflect “unit culture,” with barracks’ slang and declarations of devotion to one’s unit, along with pride in sacrifice and fearlessness in the face of death.
A few strike a lighter, more sentimental register, offering glimpses of youth abruptly cut short. One sticker, which exemplifies memorial kitsch in its most distilled form, reads: “Where beer is served warm, enjoy it warm.” Occasionally, a sticker gestures at its own absurdity. “I don’t want a sticker,” reads one. Another proclaims, “Mom, I’m stepping in history!”
On the surface, these stickers read as innocent, apolitical expressions of grief. But in Israel, where grief has never been an entirely private matter, and where militarism is so deeply ingrained in society and culture that its spectacle often goes unnoticed, they serve a different purpose. Their sheer proliferation and visual uniformity transform them into representations of politicized collective memory and trauma, projecting a public narrative of sacrifice and duty that sanctifies the war effort and helps sustain it.
Mobilizing the dead
In the context of the Gaza war, the memorial stickers function as tools of genocidal propaganda, enlisting grief itself into the machinery of perpetual war. Soldiers die; their deaths justify continued fighting; more soldiers die. “We must not stop,” declares one recurring slogan. Another vows never to turn back — “no matter what.”
The stickers’ proximity to posters of Israeli hostages reinforces this logic. The faces of the living Israeli captives seen next to those of the dead soldiers created a continuum of obligation, a visual argument that the losses already incurred require fighting “until victory.”
In the months before the ceasefire, a related campaign, initiated by Forum HaGvura (The Heroism Forum, an Israeli NGO with close ties to the government, composed of bereaved families of soldiers), appeared with that very title — “Until Victory!” — pairing fallen soldiers’ photos with the slogan. The dead, in these stickers, are silent, smiling exhortations to finish the mission they did not live to see completed.
Although the proportion of Israeli civilian to military deaths since the morning of October 7 has been nearly equal, almost all of the portraits on the stickers depict soldiers rather than civilians. This imbalance partly reflects the reality that, since that day, Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon have suffered almost exclusively military casualties. But it also mirrors Israel’s culture of bereavement, in which grief is both nationalized and stratified — with military death exalted as the highest form of sacrifice. The stickers translate that hierarchy into visual form.
By 2025, the government had formalized this logic. The Israel Government Advertising Agency (IGAA) launched a “Second Anniversary of October 7” campaign, declaring remembrance “a communal and national act.” One initiative sought to turn the memorial stickers into a unified national symbol. A song, composed entirely of collated sticker phrases and recorded by pop singer Shlomi Shabat, concluded with the line: “Until victory — your smile is always with me.” As part of the IGAA’s “And You Shall Remember” initiative, thousands of stickers were uploaded to a government website and arranged on a virtual memorial wall.
Shortly afterward, U.S. President Donald Trump announced another ceasefire deal. In the days that followed, some stickers quietly disappeared from public spaces.
Whether this reflected a coordinated state directive or merely local decisions remains unclear. If it was the former, it may signal that the state believes the stickers have fulfilled their political purpose — that the public no longer needs constant daily reminders of the sacrifices made in pursuit of the illusion of total victory. Yet the persistence of most of them suggests otherwise. The campaign endures, and its message lingers. Time will tell whether it ever fades.
Nissi Peli is a writer and an activist at New Profile – The Movement to Demilitarize Israeli Society
