A social experiment conducted via sticker on the main door to an apartment building
The sticker asked, in a gentle, handwritten script: “can we agree on… not killing CHILDREN?” It’s spread across the reinforced glass of the main door into my apartment building. It faces inward, so it’s mainly for people who live in the building, along with their friends and the steady stream of DHL and Amazon delivery drivers.
The question implicitly addresses Israel’s war on Gaza and only makes sense in a city like Berlin, where many grasp for dubious justifications for the killings. The sticker insists that this must be due to a failure to fully locate an affective response to the violence and hopes that if we pull back the lens far enough, we will eventually arrive at something that awakens a sense of horror in those whose eyes pass over it in their daily comings and goings.
I documented the sticker’s journey over the course of eight weeks.
Two days after the sticker was installed, a counter-intervention replaced the words “not killing” with “kidnapping” and “children” with “babies.” These additions were written on yellow paper in block capitals. Now the sticker read, “can we agree on … [not] KIDNAPPING BABIES?” (I include the word “not” because I find it hard to believe that the person who made the changes was in favour of kidnappping babies.)
This modification shifted the original message into something else. The killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli Occupation Forces is no longer a moral red line. Now it is justified by the October 7 Hamas attack.
The word “children”, to my mind, includes “babies”, so why change it? Almost certainly, the writer meant to allude to the now-debunked claims that Hamas decapitated infants on October 7th. The term “babies” was repeatedly used by Israeli officials and echoed by Biden to amplify the horror of these allegations.
All this aligns with a narrative that persists across almost all of Germany’s media and political institutions: the situation in Palestine is “complicated,” and no, we cannot simply agree that killing children is wrong. Or at least, we can, but only if you first acknowledge that Hamas is a singular evil. And in so doing, you concede that the acts of the Israeli army—the murdered children—are mere operational follies in the annihilation of this evil.
I took the new question seriously. And I muttered to myself as I stepped out into the night, “Yes, we can agree. I will not compromise on longstanding commitments to non-violence. I do not support kidnapping nor do I fall in line with spurious demand to support any and all acts of a monolithic Resistance”.
Pausing on the stoop, I continued:
“However, I will not allow my commitment to non-violence to degrade into a false equivalence, where hostage-taking by a militant group, born in the desperation of a gigantic concentration camp, is held as equal to the systematic bombing of civilians in that very same concentration camp.”
Two days later, there was a curious change. Someone moved the labels a few inches to the right, so that now we were asked whether we could agree on neither killing children nor kidnapping babies. This uneasy moral compromise persisted for ten days before “KIDNAPPING” again replaced “not killing,” while the “BABIES” label vanished entirely. A mere four hours later, the “kidnapping” label vanished as well, restoring the original plea for moral clarity on the Gaza genocide.
At the end of April, someone tried to remove the sticker entirely but only succeeded in damaging its edges. Yesterday, they had another go at disfiguring it. This time, the word “not” was completely removed, leaving the stark and horrifying message: “we agree on… killing CHILDREN?”
I wondered if the removal of this word was intentional. Pausing in the hallway, I thought maybe someone in my building thinks that killing children is not only justified but necessary.
To be clear: all eyes on Rafah. This is primarily about Palestinian lives, and the genocide must stop so that not one more child dies beneath the rubble of their home.
While the killings manifest a cruel and dehumanizing ideology that is directed at the Palestinian people, it occurs to me that they also represent a nihilistic exhibitionism whose audience is the entire world. What we have seen over the last nine months is a cycle. The more we resist, the more relentless the killings become. The more we appeal to international courts, the more brazenly they flout international law. The louder we condemn them, the louder their missiles.
The violence is a medium, and the message is as follows:
“We will do this unimaginable, unthinkable, gruesome thing over and over again—a thing you know is wrong, that we know is wrong. And yet we will continue doing it to show you that you have no power, and we have it all.”
This is what the sticker spoke to me last night as I stepped out into the street, and I replied, to no one in particular, that I would not meet this horror with apathy.