For the Netanyahu Government, Pro-democracy Protesters Are ‘Terrorists’ - Haaretz Today - Haaretz.com
Images of French cities set ablaze with violent protests have circulated on social media alongside photos from Israel’s recent West Bank military incursion, with users asking: “Jenin or Paris?”
None of them, notably, drew a comparison between the outraged protesters in France and their counterparts inside the Green Line – the Israelis who have been protesting their government’s judicial revolution for six months.
They would be hard-pressed to do so. Aside from the periodic Ayalon Highway bonfire, any destruction caused by the pro-democracy protest movement has been undetectable. The biggest physical danger to others is posed by deafening those around them with slogans reverberating from bullhorns.
Only one group of people refer to these demonstrations as violent and unacceptable – the government officials behind the target of the protests, the judicial overhaul.
On Wednesday, Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chair Simcha Rothman used the “t-word” – terror – in relation to the anti-overhaul demonstrations. He compared the protesters to the Israeli settlers who commit violent revenge attacks against Palestinian villages. (TP - here is where knowing “political theory” is vital for context to even understand how perverse it is that this “Religious Zionist Party” politician would analogize “Israeli Settler terrorists,” whom he is representative of in the Knesset, to those protesting against Israeli Fascist “Judicial Reform.”)
“It’s a ‘price tag’ tactic, and when it happens in Judea and Samaria, the Shin Bet sometimes defines it as terrorist incidents,” he said, after demonstrators disrupted his committee’s discussion of a bill repealing Israel’s reasonableness standard – a key part of the coalition’s judicial overhaul legislation.
Rothman was referring not just to that disruption, but to the mass demonstrations against the overhaul and the targeting of politician’s homes. The lawmaker declared that he and his coalition colleagues would not “surrender to such bullying.”
Rothman isn’t the only coalition member to compare the protesters’ tactics to violent settler rampages in which homes and cars were torched, civilians beaten and weapons fired.
These comparisons are useful in justifying the harsher tactics against the protests that have arisen in recent days.
The same day Rothman made his comments, a security guard at the intelligence minister’s home forcibly detained a protester he deemed a “security threat.” Her crime: walking with a flag near the minister’s house and refusing to reveal her identity to the guard, without knowing he was authorized to demand it.
The protester, Moran Saburai, said that when she refused to move off the public sidewalk after the guard had ordered her to, he grabbed her – and then “threw me to the side of the road and held my hand.”
A day earlier, dozens were detained at a mass protest at Ben-Gurion International Airport, during which police often resorted to what appeared to be excessive force – in some cases, holding protesters down and squeezing them by the neck.
Useful as they may be, analogies between this protest movement and the violent hate crimes committed by Israeli settlers aren’t based on observable evidence. They also contain a certain degree of amnesia regarding the behavior of Netanyahu supporters when the “government of change” was in power.
Just ask the Ra’anana neighbors of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who endured demonstrators’ bullhorns, megaphones and shouting on a regular basis. Or even ask Environment Minister Idit Silman: Back when she was Bennett’s coalition whip, before bolting to the Netanyahu camp, Silman filed a police complaint after being physically assaulted by a political opponent at a gas station.
Angry political protest from any side is undeniably disturbing and unsettling – even frightening – for those at whom it is directed. Raising such actions to the level of terror in order to justify a harsh crackdown, however, is just as disturbing.
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