Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage by U.S. Secret Service agents after being grazed by a bullet during a rally July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman July 14, 2024

JERUSALEM — The rifle shots that rang out in Pennsylvania, nearly killing former President Donald Trump, echoed in Israel as well. 

In a country that is all too familiar with political violence and assassination, the failed attempt on the former president’s life was both a reminder and a warning.

“If it had happened there would be civil war,” said Elias Abner, a Jerusalem taxi driver. “God forbid.” 

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It did happen in Israel, of course. On Nov. 4, 1995, a 25-year-old religious, ultranationalist law student fired two shots into Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s stomach and chest, mortally wounding him. The assassin, who is serving a life sentence, sought to derail the Oslo Accords that Rabin had signed with the Palestinians.

“They say the right killed Rabin,” said Avner. “With Bibi it will be someone on the left.” 

Weeks of right-wing agitation against Rabin preceded his murder, something Avner said he sees happening again.

“They blame Bibi for everything,” said Avner, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If it rains, if it’s too hot, too cold, it’s Bibi’s fault. I don’t like him, I think he has to go, but you think anybody else would be different?”

All across Jerusalem are reminders of the violence that has long backed up, or broken through, political disputes.

To order an iced coffee in the quiet, stately lobby of the King David Hotel, you pass a historic marker recalling the day, July 22, 1946, when Jewish terrorists under the command of Menachem Begin blew up what was then the headquarters of the British military command. The bomb killed 91 people, including 15 Jews.  

Just up King George Street, another plaque marks the spot in 1948 where Arab terrorists drove a car bomb onto the grounds of the Jewish National Fund. The explosion killed 14 people. 

There’s even a plaque across the street from my Airbnb, at 9 Yehuda Alkalai Street. There Mordecai Ben Uziyahu and members of the Lehi Jewish terrorist underground stored weapons and prepared bombs. Ben Uziyahu, who would go on to participate in the Deir Yassin massacre of Arab villagers, wasn’t at the building when an explosion there killed five Jewish terrorists.  

The memorials — there are hundreds throughout the country — raise a question that is more relevant than ever, considering Saturday’s assassination attempt: How does rhetoric feed violence, and what can we do to keep fierce political debate from devolving to murder and terror?  

In this hyperpartisan moment, some politicians were quick to point fingers.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, wrote on the social platform X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

There’s no evidence that the Biden campaign called for stopping Trump, as the protesters on college campuses are prone to saying, “by any means necessary.”

It’s hard to see Vance’s tweet as anything other than an attempt to score political points off a near-tragedy. If name-calling led directly to gunfire, at this point we’d all be dead.

But there is a line where rhetoric crosses into incitement, and we Americans have come right up against it.

In the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, numerous fingers pointed at the rhetoric coming from then-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu as inciting Rabin’s assassin. I interviewed Leah Rabin, his widow, after the murder, and she said she was sure Netanyahu, who appeared at rallies where Rabin was depicted on posters as a Nazi or a Palestinian terrorist, had “bloody hands.”

“No question,” she told me.

The violence the rhetoric unleashed at least temporarily shocked the country and dampened extremism. The late Israeli political scientist Ehud Spinzak found that in the aftermath of Rabin’s murder, extremist rhetoric and networks declined — for a while.

I pray we are not at a point in America where Israel was in 1995, or where it has been for much of its modern history. And if we are close, I pray we have the wisdom to pull back from the brink.

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