Posters from the 1999 Israeli elections
From a more hopeful time: colorful images with notes on techniques of persuasion and coalition building. (* means the section is not yet completed.)
I collected them during my months at the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University. I didn’t take any “working” posters down—in my home country of Canada that would be illegal. Either I took it after the vote, or it had fallen down, or I found it lying on the street or in the bushes, and a stray that was never put up. Sometimes a distributor would leave a stack of posters at a location for operatives to put up, but the rivals would find it and throw the pile into the bushes.
In Israel taking posters down or covering them over was a strategy — squads of putter-uppers would plan to do their work at an early morning time in the morning, knowing that the poster’s life was measured in hours.
Some, like Netanyahu above, were creatively graffitied. Others I had to assemble from fragments of several copies, that had been ripped and defaced by opponents. In two cases I had to climb a steep slope to retrieve the prize. Sometimes the posters were glued on top of one another, 15 or 20 deep; eventually the entire cake would unpeel and by soaking it in the bathtub I could separate the layers and get some special item.
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