After the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and the sudden “discovery” of the incitement that led to it, the Israeli cabinet got a grim reminder of just how much worse the incitement against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is.
With the recent American experience in mind, the prime minister opened a cabinet meeting with a 1:40 clip of wild incitement. Protesters, politicians, studio guests on TV, a veteran chief of a security service and others, spewed deranged invectives from the screen as the ministers watched in silence.
The clip contained explicit calls for violence. “Shoot him in the forehead,” said one woman on TV. “We are waiting for you with a noose! That’s what you deserve!” shouted another woman into a microphone to an ecstatic crowd at a demonstration. Another opined that Netanyahu must meet an end like former Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Cancer, they said. Devil. “Worst enemy of the Jewish people in 2,000 years.” Traitor. Mass murderer. War criminal. “Bibi is Hamas.” Someone even used the term “tzorer,” usually reserved in modern Hebrew for Adolf Hitler.
Head of the opposition Yair Lapid dismissed the screening of the clip and told Netanyahu not to be a “crybaby.” The usual suspects in the press joined in and smirked at the publicity stunt.
The truth is that journalists are complicit in the incitement. They not only contribute their share of demonization; they also do not report about the growing chorus calling for political violence. This is exactly why Netanyahu used the cabinet meeting to showcase the collected video evidence.
How is it, then, that the same leftist elites who miss no opportunity to remind Israel that incitement against Yitzhak Rabin led to his assassination are now indifferent to incitement that is worse by several orders of magnitude? Do they not fear another political assassination?
The answer is that, in a strange way, by the upside-down emotional logic that the left has enshrined in our national mythology, the lesson of the Rabin assassination is actually a license to, not a prohibition against, incitement. That is if such incitement is directed at Netanyahu.
To the uninitiated, this may sound absurd on its face. But once you grasp the particular way in which the left has mythologized Rabin’s assassination, you can follow—though hardly accept—the “logic” that has led to complacency towards actual calls for the actual assassination of an actual serving prime minister.
It is because the deification of Rabin was part and parcel of the demonization of Netanyahu. This is why the constant lecturing against incitement slips so easily into its opposite and justifies what it seems to oppose.
This story was born of great hope. Israel’s elites have staked their vision of Israel’s future on the hope of peace. That hope became something like a secularized version of redemption, a new age in which “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). This is how the Oslo “peace process” acquired a quasi-religious aura.
For Israel’s left-leaning elites, when the Oslo “process” began to crack under the pressure of Palestinian terrorism, it was a spiritual earthquake, not just a political watershed. To save their sense of hope, the left had to deny the obvious: that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. The left had to blame the failure of Oslo on the Israeli right because if it was our fault, then it could still be fixed and peace would again be one election away.
Rabin’s assassination played a central role in this narrative, which denied the Palestinians’ responsibility for the collapse of Oslo. We were initially told that Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir “attempted to murder peace.” We should therefore brace ourselves against “the enemies of peace on both sides” and plow on.
But then came the elections in the wake of the assassination. To everyone’s astonishment, the Oslo skeptic Netanyahu defeated the visionary peacenik Shimon Peres. So the myth was updated: Amir had actually “murdered peace.” As Hebrew University political scientist Prof. Efraim Podoksik has remarked, Netanyahu’s victory was interpreted as being facilitated by Yigal Amir, evoking the powerful biblical accusation: “Hast thou killed and also taken possession?” (1 Kings 21:19).
In reality, the opposite was true. Netanyahu won despite, not because of the assassination. Polls taken before the assassination predicted a landslide victory for Netanyahu’s Likud because Israelis were increasingly disillusioned with Oslo. So much so that even the sympathy engendered by the assassination couldn’t completely stem the tide.
But reality had no chance against the myth of murder and inheritance, which now also sought to put the gun in Netanyahu’s hand. The story was retroactively reconstructed to cast Netanyahu not only as taking possession but also as killing.
It was Netanyahu’s incitement, we were told, that brought about the murder that then enabled Netanyahu to take possession. It was all his doing. In this convoluted way, the hope of peace was preserved. It was only Netanyahu’s fiendish machinations that stood between Israel and its secular redemption.
This was all based on sheer slander. Netanyahu never incited against Rabin. As even leftist Haaretz journalist Anshel Pfeffer concluded in his hostile biography of Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s alleged incitement was a myth.
“The charge that [Netanyahu] led the incitement has become accepted truth,” wrote Pfeffer. “But at no point did Netanyahu use the vocabulary of the far right against Rabin and his ministers. … He confronted those who were chanting ‘Rabin the traitor,’ admonishing them. ‘He’s not a traitor, [but] he’s making a big mistake,’ he said forcefully at a rally in April. ‘We are dealing with political rivals, not enemies. We are one nation.’”
Yet the myth of Netanyahu’s “incitement” plays so central a role in leftist mythology, is so crucial to preserving the left’s dream of an Israel living in peace with all its neighbors, that facts could never dislodge it. So, for the fanatic Never Bibi demonstrators and their sympathizers throughout Israel’s leftist establishment, the real lesson of the Rabin assassination remains that Netanyahu is evil personified.
Thus, incitement against Netanyahu may not be nice, may even not be legal, but is nevertheless in the left’s mind understandable. They simply cannot let go of the voodoo doll that they substitute for reality, as if stabbing it could make reality go away and bring back the lost peace process.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the anti-Netanyahu fanatics. Some of them are calling for political violence and they do not mean it only metaphorically. Their lesson from one political assassination has morphed into a wish for another.
The danger is therefore real. If someone acts on these wild impulses, law enforcement, the State Attorney and the Attorney General, as well as chiefs of police and the Shin Bet, will have a lot to answer for—because their inaction is allowing the fire to spread. We are not far from what just happened in the U.S. The writing is very clearly on the wall. It’s time to enforce the law.