There’s a contested region in my neighborhood in North London. It’s a serene, leafy
street that slopes gently downhill for the length of six blocks.

The dispute is between me and an unseen nemesis who’s been putting up those red,
green, and black anti-Israel stickers. They spring up daily on street signs, poles, junction
boxes, a doctor’s shingle and the window of a local supermarket.

I’ve found myself inventing errands to find and remove the stickers.

I counted 30 stickers on the first day I noticed them. As I was peeling off the final one, I
had my first interaction. A UPS delivery man walking to an idling truck nearby bellowed,
“Oi! Whatchoo doin’ THAT for?!”

The “Oi!” has the same sound as our patented “Oy…” but the intonation is not our
monosyllabic lament of sympathy or dismay, but the opposite.

“OI!! I ASKED YOU WHAT YOU WERE DOING!” the driver said again.

“Well… I already got the other 29 off,” I said cheerfully.

His reply was lost in the grumble of the truck as his partner, the driver, revved the
engine, “Listen bruv – VVVVRRRRRRROOOM – so YOU think about THAT!!”
And I thought about THAT. He’s there to deliver packages, not deliver a lecture on his
pro-antisemitic graffiti stance. If I was kicking a puppy then, sure, it’s ok for him to break
character as a delivery man and get involved.

Sometimes there are stickers on the window at the entrance of a local, established
supermarket that we’ll call ‘Baitwoes.’ As no staff are instructed or bothered enough to
remove them, it suggests to me, a sort of tacit corporate approval. One morning, as I’m
peeling a sticker off the Baitwoes window, I have my second encounter as a guy stops
to ask what I’m doing.

I ‘explain’ that I’m on The Council’s Neighbourhood Beautification Mondays Taskforce.
He’s actually satisfied by this and walks on. “That IS a good line,” I think and file it away.

WAR JOURNAL No. 1
Yesterday, advanced tactics were employed by my nemesis. The stickers were now
under the protection of a layer of grease, maybe vaseline. The idea being that it would
be impossible for meddling Zionists to gain purchase on the now gelatinous, slick
stickers and peel them off. And this would be true, had I not walked ahead one full
minute to the hardware store and splashed out £1 for a small plastic scraper. Using this
scraper plus physics and some elbow grease, I was miraculously able to overpower the
grease-drenched, soggy stickers.

One day, I passed two young schoolgirls, throwing sticks at a brick wall, trying to hit a
very big spider. They are old enough to know better, young enough not to care.
The spider’s fate lies in their accuracy, patience and school timetable. In fairness to the
girls, this giant thing looks diabolical, almost too scary to live. But c’mon…

They miss the spider every time and stop to only glance at me peeling off a sticker.
“Wait- why are you doing that?” one of them asks.

“I’m on The Council’s Neighbourhood Beautification Thursdays Taskforce,” I say.
“OH so you SUPPORT…” She’s stuck, thwarted and searches for a half-remembered
word from the generally accepted narrative. It’s JUST out… of… reach: “Gentro…
Gentry, Germicide…”

Her brow furrows and she grits her teeth, “gemo..” she says with a hateful expression in
search of that elusive word for that thing… She probably could have hit that spider if she
had just concentrated this hard with the stick-throwing arachnicide.

Her friend is glowering at me and I know that look, she’s twigged from my voice that I’m
not from around here.

Specifically, I’m a New York-raised, UK-based Italian American Jew, the son of two
educators, a Jewish mother and an Italian-American father.

“But how?!” she asks. “You’re… you’re not… ARE… are you even ALLOWED to… Wait-
what council? WHAT Taskforce?! She’s already pivoted from my Pro-Israel de-stickering and needs to suss out how an American is even allowed to remove the stickers. I’ve
clearly been tasked by some unclear, shadowy council scheme (probably run by The
Jews!)

“GENNACIDIS!!” is hurled at me by the first girl. The students turn to each other and
whisper in a huddled, urgent conference to sound it out, to decide which hashtag or
buzzword they want to utter as an indictment. Then, they have it and one says it
decisively, proudly like she had the winning word on a THE most sobering game show
ever aired: “GENOCIDE!” Her friend sort of harmonizes the accusation in that annoying
UPspeak devoid of conviction, “GENocide?”

I’d already walked away, crumpling the sticker, scanning for a bin. I never learned if the
spider made it.

WAR JOURNAL No. 2
We circle each other, me and this peddler of ill-will to Israel. Another sticker will appear,
mere minutes after I’ve removed it in my measured, almost performative way. I want him
to see me do it. I feel as if I’m circling my unseen opposite number, the sticker person. I
can feel it. It’s a matter of time before our paths cross.

But how do I know my nemesis is not a nemisess…?

I’ve ruled out the woman who saw me scraping off the stickers. She said, “Thank you
very much for doing this. I’ve been taking them off the street signs when I see them.”
She didn’t mention if she was Jewish and I didn’t ask.

I find myself trying to figure out my opposite number, from the few facts I have from
sticker placement.

1. They sticker mostly at night either for privacy, cowardice or a work schedule.
2. They are not as tall as I am at 6 feet tall.
3. They are lazy or a creature of habit: They sticker only on the north side of the
street. I haven’t seen stickers on the south side unless there’s a separate cat and
mouse game going on there.

A sticker holding a note was left for me on a pole, a verbose diatribe, hand-written on an
index card in FOUNTAIN PEN. It has words like ‘daresay’ and ‘disdainful.’ The
penmanship is immaculate and even stylish. This is not the exasperated scrawl of
someone in their 20’s. The note concludes with an admonition in flawless cursive to
“Hang your head in shame for being a Zionist!” So now I can surmise also, that they are
a somewhat posh and mature antisemite.

I share my theories with a trusted buddy. He’s got a few years on me, has lived all over
the globe and is keenly perceptive. He adds two more facts, “this is a hateful asshole
with time on his hands,” and he cautions me “watch your step, Mike”

WAR JOURNAL No. 3
As I was peeling off stickers, a guy nearby opened his car trunk. It was dusk and the
trunk light illuminated a big length of coiled rope. It occurred to me that this would be a
perfect time and location for me to get trussed up and tossed in a trunk. The streets
were quiet, just us, me, and the early bird with a whole lot of rope in his trunk. NOTE TO
SELF: Must remember to no longer make a big show of slowly taking down the stickers.

I’ve begun to take them down swiftly now, but with a precise, conservationist twist.
Using my credit card as a straight edge, I tear off the call-to-action of ‘BOYCOTT’ /
‘END’ and the charges of ‘GENOCIDE’ / ‘APARTHEID’ so that only the word ‘ISRAELI’
remains. The medium is the message.

I then take off that last vowel and it simply says ISRAEL. It’s a proper noun. Who can
argue with that? It’s not hateful, just a statement: ISRAEL, which I then place back on
the poles and junction boxes. The one-word sticker now underscoring the geographical
size of Israel itself. Small, isolated. Enduring.

MIKE CAPOZZOLA is The UK’s ONLY Italian-American JEWISH Stand Up Comedian.
He’s performed in 25 countries across the UK, Europe and Middle East at comedy clubs,
theatres, comedy festivals, comic cons, science museums, synagogues, Hillels, chabads,
Jewish Community Centers and two Kosher breweries. He lives in North London as you know.