IT'S NOT?:

For all of its modernity, military firepower, and high-tech know-how, Israel has for decades been unable to keep images of women from being defaced in some public spaces. Billboards showing women -- including soccer players, musicians, and young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious extremists in Jerusalem and other cities with large ultra-Orthodox populations over the past 20 years.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was erased from a 2015 photograph of world leaders in Paris published by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper.

The pattern is especially uncomfortable now.

"This is not Kabul, this is Jerusalem," said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a Jerusalem deputy mayor. "This is a concerted campaign by radicals to erase women from the public space, which belongs to all of us."

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