The Occupation as Entertainment

  launched the second season of their popular show late last year with an ominous billboard campaign. Posted overnight in several cities around Israel, the billboards featured two sentences in Arabic script against an all-black background: “We are coming to get you” and “The action begins soon.” (The wording varied from sign to sign.) Nothing about the billboards suggested that they were advertisements for a TV series, and, to some Israelis, they looked like flags of the Islamic State: dark and menacing. The mayor of at least one city ordered them removed. But, to me, the billboards looked like something else altogether: a fearmongering campaign by Jews against Palestinians. They reminded me of Israel’s 2015 election, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Jewish Israelis to get out and vote because