Meretz launches campaign protesting Bnei Brak billboard bamboozle
The Meretz activists will display an electronic changing billboard entirely made up of pictures of women at Dizengoff Center on Friday.
By TAMAR URIEL-BEERIUpdated: JANUARY 23, 2019 04:57Meretz Party Leader Tamar Zandberg holding a sign saying #YouWillNotEraseMe as a protest of her face being removed from Bnei Brak billboards, 2019.(photo credit: MERETZ)
Meretz launched a campaign titled #YouWillNotEraseMe on Tuesday following the demand of Bnei Brak advertising companies not to display pictures of women on billboards.Last week, a billboard with a photo of Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg was not installed near the border of Bnei Brak and Ramat Gan. This week, Meretz announced that it plans to sue the Bnei Brak Municipality if it does not allow women’s faces to appear on billboards in the haredi city.“Let’s not be mistaken,” said Zandberg. “When they remove women from signs, they’re erasing women from campuses, and they’re silencing violence against women. It’s not about my face. It’s about all of us.”As a response, the Meretz activists will display an electronic changing billboard entirely made up of pictures of women at Dizengoff Center on Friday.Meretz representatives will invite women to be photographed holding a sign captioned #YouWillNotEraseMe. The pictures will immediately be projected onto the billboard overhead.This is not the first action the leftist political party has taken against the discrimination in Bnei Brak.Meretz released a video in which billboards featuring prominent women were erased. The famous figures on the billboards included Eurovision song contest winner Netta Barzilai, Nobel Prize Winner Ada Yonath, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut and Olympic medal-winning judoka Yael Arad.Hatnua leader Tzipi Livni also released a video earlier this week featuring a billboard sponsored by businesspeople calling for centrist party leaders to unite. The sign had the faces of the centrist leaders one beside the other. However, the version of the billboard that was displayed in Bnei Brak had removed Livni’s face.“It’s not my face they want to remove, but the faces of the women in Israel, over half of the population,” Livni said in the video.Lahav Harkov contributed to this report.
