It's more of a feeling than a precise statistic: Israelis hung far fewer flags this Independence Day than they did in previous years. Ever since I was a child, I remember how, as Israel’s Memorial Day approached, almost all cars were decorated with the blue and white flag and they fluttered from every balcony. The custom transcended demographic and political boundaries.

This year, at least in Tel Aviv, most balconies are missing a flag. The same is true of cars. If the parking lot of the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery before Memorial Day ceremony was once a sea of flags, this year I counted an average of one per every 10 cars. Similarly, when driving on the intercity highways, my impression was that most cars lacked an Israeli flag.

“There are no flags in Ashkelon, either,” said local resident Lea Margalit, though another resident of the southern town disagreed, saying, “Actually, there are many more flags this year than last year.”

Various polls over the past few years have shown that most of us still hang flags to mark Independence Day. In 2002, for example, 78% of respondents to a survey conducted by the Jewish Agency said that they plan to hang up a flag, compared with 16% who said that they would not. In 2007, another, nonrepresentative survey of visitors to the right-leaning Channel 7 website found that 60% of respondents claimed that they would hang a flag. About a quarter of these even said that they would hang a flag on both their home and their car. Another nonrepresentative poll conducted recently by the popular Mako website came up with similar findings: 68% of respondents declared that they would hang a flag, with about a third of them saying that they would hang flags on both their homes and their cars.