Elections have just been announced and already we are being warned that we are in for a particularly aggressive election campaign. The reason: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of course.
Opinion columnists and social media pundits are insisting that Netanyahu is desperate. They say he is fighting for his political life and will be more divisive than ever; the stunt he pulled last time, warning the public that "the Arabs are voting in droves," is just a taste of what awaits. In the coming weeks, we will realize we have not yet hit rock bottom. In a struggle for his survival, they say, Netanyahu will not hesitate to bombard social media with his typical propaganda drivel. Expect the worst.
None of this really has anything to do with actual anxiety over the public discourse ahead of the national elections. Rather, this false morality should be understood as a sign the gloves are coming off, or, alternatively, as an effort to come up with an excuse if they lose. By saying Netanyahu is "unfair" and does not respect the rules of the game, the Left is preparing to adopt tactics outside the accepted political repertoire. When this strategy also proves a failure, the Left will be able to tell itself that it, the representative of decency and democracy, never stood a chance.
But this is mostly hypocritical posturing, something that should in the forefront of our minds before April 9. Netanyahu, the Likud party and the Right do not incite, divide or fragment any more than anyone else. This is just the lie the Left tells itself for its own psycho-political needs.
Every time the Left says "Netanyahu incites," remember how those supposedly pacifist proponents of peace enlisted a respectable collection of past and present generals to pound on the desk and shout that Netanyahu is a strategic threat to Israel's security.
Recall how at every opportunity, they refer to right-wing voters as "riffraff" or "amulet kissers," how they belittle the right-wing worldview as "sentimental," how they explain away its political support as "surrender to populism" or "blind loyalty." Keep in mind just who was unwilling to recognize the decision of Israeli voters as conscious and reasonable, attributing it instead to "battered wife syndrome," "ethnic vengeance" or a "protest vote." When elections come around, the Left sees a large portion of the public as a dark mass of pathological retardation that must be saved from itself.
Remember the Left's flippant comparisons of the democratically elected Netanyahu to the ancient Roman Emperor Caligula, France's military leader Napoleon Bonaparte, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. To their shame, they have even gone so far as to cite Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in their attempts to explain that victory at the ballot box does not mean anything because the Nazis also succeeded in their use of incitement and populism at the ballot box.
Whatever Netanyahu has said in the past or will say in the future cannot compare to the Left's 40-year tradition of demonizing the Right and its voters, and its foolish delegitimization of democratic decision-making by attacking the officials elected to office. Today the Left swears that Netanyahu is desperate and will go lower than ever before. Tomorrow the leftists will shout it is either "us or them."
