Our right to choose

26/10/22

They are up! Just a few days ago, our bus-side billboards went up on major public transportation lines all over the country’s crowded central region of Gush Dan. They will continue to spread our message to the streets until Election Day.

(Text on billboard: Abortion is my right. This time, we are voting to protect our rights)

Our original plan had been to plaster these signs across buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but at the very last second, the advertising company informed us that Egged Transportation Limited, the largest bus company in Israel and the Jerusalem bus operator, did not approve the message. We asked what the issue was, seeking to understand what could be done. But we just got a brief boilerplate email in response demanding a “different message.”

What “different message” might Egged have meant? Maybe the billboards of the extremist anti-abortion organization Efrat, whose ads Egged has publicized and who Egged has platformed for years and years with no complaint? 

So we found an alternative solution, and made sure our signs went up - on buses in several times as many cities as we had even initially planned. Not just in Tel Aviv, but bus lines in Bat Yam, Petah Tikvah, Ramat Gan and B’nei Brak are all carrying our campaign.

The censorship attempt on Egged’s part just proves how powerful and pertinent our message is, and how critical it is that it be heard. It needs to reverberate through the public sphere, rolling on every road and reaching every voter en route to the ballot box.

The efforts to silence us, smear us, and strike down our basic rights are only getting more pronounced and pernicious. There are Knesset candidates and entire parties running on platforms that detail fully- operational plans to negate rights that we thought were safe and sound but are no longer sure bets.

Watch this news item that was a part of the early edition of Channel N12’s broadcast, in which correspondent Michal Peylan relays in great detail these developments and shares extensively about our campaign: https://zaz.im/go/19u5xx?source=facebook