The Paper War: How a City’s Poles Became the Battlefield for a Global Conflict’s Grief 

This new documentary, “Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” examines how the simple act of posting and tearing down flyers of Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas became a vicious proxy war on New York City streets, tearing apart the city’s social fabric. Following the October 7th attacks, the posters were initially seen as a humanizing gesture of solidarity, but they quickly became a flashpoint, with anti-Israel protesters tearing them down as a political statement against one-sided narratives, an act supporters condemned as profound antisemitism.

The film argues that this urban conflict, amplified by social media and leading to public shaming and firings, was ultimately a brutal struggle over “whose grief gets to exist in public space,” revealing deep communal fractures and the challenge of coexisting amid intense, polarized global tensions.

The Paper War: How a City’s Poles Became the Battlefield for a Global Conflict’s Grief 

In the heart of New York City, a new kind of urban warfare began in the autumn of 2023. The weapons weren’t guns or bombs, but paper and glue. The battlefield was every lamppost, construction shed, and public utility pole. The casualties, in a sense, were our shared sense of community. This was the Israel-Palestine poster war, a visceral, local proxy for a distant and devastating conflict, now chronicled in the new documentary, “Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets.” 

The film, and the phenomenon it examines, is about far more than torn paper. It’s a stark examination of whose pain is deemed legitimate, whose humanity is granted space in our collective consciousness, and how a global crisis can fracture the social fabric of a city thousands of miles away. 

The Posters: A Plea for Humanity in a Sea of Anonymity 

In the days following Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, which left 1,200 dead and 251 taken hostage, a grassroots movement emerged. Personalized posters, each bearing the face of a kidnapped individual, began appearing across New York. They were simple, devastating, and deeply humanizing. From 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, his entire life captured in a single, innocent photo, to 85-year-old Shlomo Mantzur, these were not statistics. They were faces with names. 

For families and supporters, these posters were a lifeline—a way to combat the paralyzing helplessness. As Liam Zeitchik, a New Yorker with six abducted family members, expresses in the film, seeing the face of his 5-year-old blonde niece, Emma Aloni, on a city pole “meant the world to me to see that other people cared about them.” In a moment of profound isolation, the posters created a silent, city-wide vigil. They were a physical manifestation of the plea: “Remember us. Do not let them be forgotten.” 

For Israeli native and Brooklyn resident Nim Shapira, the director of Torn, their initial appearance was a point of pride. “I saw the posters go up and I was proud of my city,” he recalls. It was a gesture of solidarity he recognized from home, transplanted to the streets he now called home. 

The Tearing: An Erasure of Grief and a Political Statement 

This act of public mourning was almost immediately met with a counter-action: the systematic tearing down of the posters. This was not the casual removal of outdated flyers; it was a deliberate, often confrontational, political act. 

The motivations behind the tearing were complex and varied, a core focus of Shapira’s documentary. For some anti-Israel protesters and left-wing activists, the posters represented a one-sided narrative. In their view, the flyers highlighted Israeli suffering while entirely erasing the decades of Palestinian suffering under occupation and the escalating death toll in Gaza, which has since risen to tens of thousands. The posters, to them, were not neutral pleas for human life but tools of propaganda, framing Israel as a sole victim. 

This perspective is chillingly captured in an encounter Liam Zeitchik had while putting up a poster of his niece. An instigator told him the little girl “looks like a white colonizer.” This moment lays bare a dehumanizing ideology where even a child’s face can be reduced to a political symbol, her inherent right to safety and life stripped away by a devastating label. 

For others in the Jewish community, like Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the tearing was unambiguous. “This is antisemitism at its deepest level. It’s an expression of inhumanity at its deepest level,” he told the New York Post in 2023. From this vantage point, the act of tearing down a poster of a kidnapped infant or elderly Holocaust survivor wasn’t a political protest; it was a visceral hatred directed at Jewish suffering itself. 

The Digital Amplification and Real-World Consequences 

The “paper war” was fought not only on the streets but in the digital realm. Smartphone cameras turned every confrontation into a potential viral moment. This had two profound effects. 

First, it led to public shaming, doxxing, and professional repercussions. The article notes the cases of a Mayor Eric Adams staffer tasked with promoting diversity and a young woman who later worked in Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s office, who were both caught on video removing posters and faced public outcry and firings. The personal was now irreversibly political, and actions once performed in the anonymity of city life now carried a permanent, career-defining cost. 

Second, it created a feedback loop. Videos of poster-tearing fueled outrage among Israel supporters, solidifying their belief in rising antisemitism. Conversely, videos of aggressive confrontations over the posters were used by Palestine supporters to highlight what they saw as a disproportionate focus on Israeli victims. The digital arena became a theater of war, where the most extreme actions were amplified, deepening the divide and hardening positions. 

Whose Grief Gets to Exist? 

At its core, Shapira’s film posits a powerful, central question: “The film is about whose grief gets to exist in public space.” This is the crux of the entire conflict. 

In a multicultural, global city like New York, public space is a finite resource, both physically and emotionally. The act of posting was a claim to that space—an insistence that this specific grief was urgent and demanded attention. The act of tearing was a rejection of that claim, an argument that other, competing griefs were being silenced or ignored. 

It became a tragic competition of victimhood, where acknowledging one set of victims was perceived, by some, as denying another. The public square, once a place for community announcements and local events, was transformed into a zero-sum arena for human suffering. 

The Torn Social Fabric 

The lasting damage, as the documentary’s title implies, is not to the lampposts but to the community itself. “Not only the posters were torn, but the social fabric of New York was torn apart,” Shapira reflects. “We have to find a way to live with each other.” 

The poster war revealed fissures that ran through neighborhoods, workplaces, and friendships. It forced people to choose sides in a conflict with a complex, painful history, often reducing nuanced individuals to simplistic, opposing labels. The shared identity of being a New Yorker was, for a time, subsumed by a global identity politics that allowed for no middle ground. 

“Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets” is more than a record of a strange and bitter moment in the city’s history. It is a cautionary tale. It shows how international conflicts, mediated through social media and absolutist ideologies, can localize in the most intimate ways. It challenges us to ask whether we can create a public square spacious enough for competing griefs, and whether we can see the humanity in a face on a poster, even when we disagree fiercely with the politics of the nation it comes from. 

The posters are mostly gone now, weathered away or torn down. But the questions they raised about empathy, tribalism, and our capacity to live alongside those with whom we profoundly disagree remain, unanswered, on the streets of New York.