Netanyahu is exploiting Trump’s attempted assassination to target left-wing dissenters in Israel
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already trying to capitalize on former President Donald Trump’s attempted assassination. Photo-illustration by Nora Berman; Debbie Hill and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman July 15, 2024
It took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost no time to start trying to use Saturday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump for his own political gain.
It was a little after 1:00 am on Sunday in Israel when Thomas Matthew Crooks began to shoot at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, grazing the candidate’s ear and killing one rally attendee. But Netanyahu’s extremist ministers in Likud were quick to suggest the event boded ill for their own leader.
“The assassination attempt of President Trump comes after nonstop incitement against him in the US,” communications minister Shlomo Karhi wrote on Twitter. “In Israel, the reality is significantly more dire.”
Like supporters of Trump in the U.S., Netanyahu’s acolytes are trying to capitalize on collective shock at the assassination attempt — which authorities say does not appear to have been part of a broader conspiracy — in order to crush dissent against his authoritarian aims. In the U.S., Sen. J.D. Vance, who today was announced as Trump’s vice presidential candidate, said in a statement that “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” (Biden decried the attempted assassination, saying “No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.”)
But if attempts to clearly and forcefully condemn the fascist inclinations of Trump and Netanyahu are labeled as incitement to assassination, then our ability to freely speak the truth will have been dealt a crushing blow.
I experienced the consequences of this new, threatening environment during a May trip to Israel. Over lunch with friends in Tel Aviv, my Israeli husband and I spoke about our profound disapproval of Netanyahu: How shameful his leadership had been, especially after Oct. 7; how transparent his desire to hold onto power at any cost had become.
Then we noticed a middle-aged man standing next to our table, holding up a cell phone and filming us.
“I just recorded you inciting against the prime minister,” he said calmly. “I’m going to publicize this video.”
The idea that a private conversation between four people at lunch could be construed as inciting violence against a world leader was ludicrous. But the man’s actions were chilling. I was not afraid because of what he threatened to do to us, but rather because of what his threat meant for Israeli society, and the ability of its citizens to speak truth to power.
It felt like my first encounter with an Orwellian “thought police,” and a frightening glimpse of a future in which engaging in political dissent may be increasingly dangerous.
The process of crafting that future in Israel is already underway. Since Oct. 7, Netanyahu’s government has brutally cracked down on peaceful demonstrations and arrested Palestinian citizens of Israel for merely expressing sympathy with civilians in Gaza on social media. Police at protests, under the control of one of Netanyahu’s most radical ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, have dragged family members of hostages away by their hair; confiscated anti-government signs from protesters (even though it is illegal to do so); and targeted volunteer medics with water cannons.
Yet despite the fact that protests against Netanyahu have been largely peaceful, with police responsible for most of the violence at them, Netanyahu’s ministers have for months decried them as evidence of “open incitement to assassinate the prime minister.”
As right-wing politicians in the U.S. have tried to blame Saturday’s attack on Trump on liberal criticisms of him as a would-be authoritarian, it’s too easy to imagine similar crackdowns coming into effect here, if Trump wins in November.
The American right is desperate to suggest that outrage over Trump’s politics will inevitably instill a desire to commit political violence in those on the left— which is deeply ironic considering Trump’s extensive record of advocating violence, both against his political enemies and against protesters.
In 2016, Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” could take matters into their own hands against his then-presidential rival, Hillary Clinton. In 2017, he encouraged law enforcement in Long Island to be rough with the people they arrested. In 2020, he suggested shooting demonstrators protesting outside the White House after George Floyd was murdered.
The pattern is clear: For the right, it’s no problem if an authoritarian leader incites his followers to violence. But if his opponents object to that incitement, they become the truly violent ones.
In Israel, Netanyahu has been repeatedly accused of inciting the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, having been the featured speaker at demonstrations where the crowd chanted “Death to Rabin.” He even marched at the head of a mock funeral procession for Rabin four months before he was gunned down.
Yet now, despite being “one of the most protected heads of state in the world,” according to Amos Harel, security analyst at Haaretz, Netanyahu’s response to the attack on Trump was to order law enforcement and the attorney general of Israel to investigate “anti-right-wing incitement” against him and his family. The morning after Trump’s attempted assassination, Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting — without evidence — that the majority of political violence in Israel was directed toward right-wing politicians.
His actions mimicked those of Trump’s camp, who called for investigations of the Biden campaign, the Department of Justice, and the FBI in the wake of the attempted assassination accusing them of covering up a conspiracy to kill the Republican nominee. Both heads of state and their allies are weaponizing real fears of political assassination to quash resistance to their authoritarianism. If their efforts are successful — and if Trump is elected in November — the events of this weekend will ensure the future for both the U.S. and Israel is a bleak one for those who believe in liberty, and peaceful dissent.
David Frum wrote yesterday in The Atlantic that: “Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
It is imperative that we find the language, or soon, our right to use it will be gone.
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