Year after year, we – rightly – repeat the late Yitzhak Rabin's warning from Nov. 4, 1995, that "violence eats away at the foundations of Israeli democracy."
"It must be condemned, criticized, isolated. That is not Israel's way. In a democracy, there can be disagreements, but the decision will be made in democratic elections," Rabin said.
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We need to oppose incitement against specific persons, calls of "traitor," the dehumanization of political rivals, and comparisons to past dictators and hints about their fate. For 25 years, the message has been sent out, but not received. And the last few years actually prove that not only does the Israeli Left incite, it refuses to condemn incitement.
The protests outside the Prime Minister's Residence are a Woodstock of hatred. They are not a rational political event, but an emotional one. They are a religious ceremony, a mass catharsis, in which hatred is celebrated at the barricades, a ceremony in which it is permissible to compare the prime minister to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu or Louis XVI, and we all know how they ended up.
It's a festival in which participants slander and attack thousands of people whom they hold in contempt. The terminology isn't political, it's one of revolutionary radicalism.
When you listen to the protesters, it turns out that the common denominator among them is pathological hatred for one figure. We hear this in the unification of the left-wing battles, which is basically a statement with a transparent subtext that it is more important to battle the enemy than it is to promote your own ideas (because each struggle has a different ideology, but they all have one enemy in common). That is the only explanation for the presence of signs that read "Liberate the Gaza ghetto," "Murderers in Uniform," and the red flags of tyrannical communism.
The Israeli media is fanning the flames of the protest movement for two main reasons. The first is that they identify with the protesters, with the political view of "Anyone but Bibi." It's not a deep ideology, it's a deep-seated loathing for the man and the Right. The second reason for the inflated coverage is prosaic – it's August, silly season, and both COVID and the media are looking for some action.
The media is treating the protests like it did the social justice movement of 2011 – as a sacred cosmic event of the first magnitude. The media follows the demonstrators with empathy and is outraged at the police, who are allowing the protests to go on into the wee hours of the morning and exercising selective enforcement the likes of which we have never seen. The media is forgiving of violence (an attack on a police detective), threats ("We'll pull you behind a truck … you're dead," they shouted at journalist Avishay Ben Haim), to crude insults against the prime minister and his family.
But back in 2005, the media treated protests against the disengagement as a direct threat to democracy, a threat to a decision by the cabinet and the elected Knesset.
Back then, every time protesters blocked off a road, and every anti-disengagement rally was treated as a challenge to governability and the nation's existence. The media enlisted to defend the realm, supporting an attack on the basic principles of law in a democratic country. When then-Attorney General Meni Mazuz threatened to sentence activists who blocked roads to 20 years in prison, no one reared up in defense of the right to protest.
I wouldn't buy a used car the Israeli media was trying to sell me.
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