The judicial reform debates have been a heated war of words since the declaration of the legal overhaul in January, but recent months have seen a nuclear escalation in the rhetorical arms race that could leave the political and societal commons inhospitable.
Conventional insults and labels were launched soon after the first marches against the reform, with the government labeled a “dictatorship” for trying to alter the relationships between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches. The coalition has returned fire by calling the Supreme Court of Justice a dictatorship for rulings that it believes has interfered in democratically sanctioned governance.
Each side has developed its own munitions for further rounds of combat. Reformists have bombarded protesters with accusations of being “traitors” and “anarchists,” while coalition members have been blasted as “messianic” and “racist.”
These insults are damaging enough to the Israeli societal fabric without escalation. Such extreme labels serve to otherize the opposite political camp. Foreigners have in the past been amazed how Israelis have been able to vigorously disagree over politics, but then break bread as if nothing happened. Politics was not the entirety of one’s life, and no reason to ruin relationships.
Yet by labeling political opponents with monstrous titles, they become not rivals but bitter enemies. Israelis risk creating not just political polarization, but social and cultural polarization like that in the United States of America, in which Republican and Democrat family members prepare for rhetorical battle ahead of holiday meals, or refuse to speak to on another all together. The recoil from using all these linguistic devices is that Israelis may find it difficult to have Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot meals at the same table as someone who is a “anarchist” or “fascist.”
If political opponents are seen as only having malicious intentions rather than policy disagreements, its easy to see the conflagration as a zero-sum conflict in which there can be no compromise. This is evident in how protest groups and politicians reject negotiation outlines — In which it is said that there can be no agreements with dictators or traitors because it will only aid the agenda to destroy the country.
Memory of Holocaust being used as a political weapon
In response to President Isaac Herzog’s recent armistice outline, activist Shikma Bressler said it was “forbidden to talk to Nazis, regardless of if they are Jewish or not.”
Activist Shikma Bressler was not the first to use the Nazi slur during this year of turmoil, but her prominence in the debate seems led the Friday statement to create shockwaves like few others. It seems representative of an escalation to nuclear-level slander.
While Bressler has apologized for calling the coalition members “Nazis,” supporters on social media have doubled down on the characterizing the government in such a fashion.
Hadash MK Ofer Cassif on Sunday shared a video of a Nazi officer taking umbrage with being called an Nazi, writing “If it thinks like a Kahanist, speaks like a Kahanist, and acts like a Kahanist — It’s a Nazi.”
National Missions Minister Orit Struck complained on Sunday at a presentation of a civil service reform of having been called a Nazi by a Hadassah hospital doctor, and that rhetoric was escalating. Prime Minister called for citizens to calm in their use of “incitement” at the Sunday cabinet meeting, decrying Bressler for a second time and claiming that a second prominent activist wrote to a government minister that he was “worse than the Nazis.”
Yet coalition supporters have also employed the memory of the Holocaust to attack the opposition. The Brothers in Arms protest group said on August 22 that a Likud activist had called them Nazis, photoshopping them into historical images of the Holocaust. In July, Likud activist Itzik Zarka called for “six million more” Ashkenazim to “burn.” Anti-reform activists like the Pink Front have shared messages from people telling them to go to die in Auschwitz.
Banding about the Holocaust in everyday political speech has become so normalized that UTJ Yisrael Eichler thought it appropriate to attack Netanyahu for saying “God hasn’t always shielded us, especially in Europe,” by claiming that Zionists hadn’t cared about Holocaust victims and some had encouraged their fate.
Iran capitalizing on Israel’s internal discord
Iran has capitalized on the discourse to attempt to sow even more discord. The Shin Bet said on Monday that Iranian agents had created the photo circulating on social media portraying IDF Central Command head Major-General Yehuda Fox as Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The fallout of calling fellow Israelis Nazis is not just that it is even more polarizing than other rhetorical weapons. Diaspora Jews have been endeavoring for decades to defend Israel from attacks from without labeling them as Nazis; comparing Israelis to their historic oppressors in deeply antisemitic cynical manipulations. The issues was even included in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which states that an example of antisemitism is “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The fight against this manifestation of antisemitism is completely undermined when proliferated by Israelis themselves.
This problem also appears when ex-officials like former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo claim that Israel is enforcing an apartheid state. Pardo attacked the government to the backdrop of his vocal opposition to the judicial reform plan, giving the appearance that the allegation was leveled to undermine the government rather than to critique on the system as a whole.
As with the Nazi slur, if Israelis begin launching accusations of apartheid at one another then it would undermine the public diplomacy work of state and Diaspora Jews to counter the label. Anti-Israel activists and politically-motivated “human rights” NGOs have attempted to delegitimize and ostracize Israel on the international stage by declaring the country apartheid.
If there is any hope of the opposition and coalition coming to a peaceful conclusion in this chapter of Israel’s history, they must stand down from this escalation from conventional to nuclear verbal attacks.
If they do not, they will engage in mutually assured destruction, leaving Israel’s society, politics, and diplomatic relations in radioactive ruin. There is no point to any of these political conflicts if the winner is left with a nuclear wasteland of atomized individuals to rule over.
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