[Jpost] NATIONAL AFFAIRS: Events may come to a head next week with a vote on judicial reform and a proposed nationwide strike.I’ve mostly been ignoring what are functionally anti-Bibi protests across Israel, fanned and aided by the international leftwing deep state currently finding favour with the Biden administration. This piece linked by Skidmark in comments suggests I was wrong to do so, though I did post something about the head of the CIA going on about a third Intifada the other day. Skipping straight down to the meat of the thing:
...So, yes, one can understand the talk of a third intifada, even though threats of a third intifada are something we are accustomed to hearing at regular intervals – either when there is a spike in terrorism, or when the Palestinians want to apply pressure on Israel. After a while, one gets inured to the threats, though this time the talk of a third intifada seems more serious.Still, there are significant differences. First, the Palestinian violence today is not being planned, financed and executed by the PA, as was the case with Yasser Arafat when he headed the PA during the Second Intifada. Second, Israel has much better intelligence than it did in 2000, when it had moved out of the Palestinian areas under the Oslo Accords.
Additionally, the security forces are busy night and day pursuing terrorist targets throughout Judea and Samaria, including inside the Palestinian cities and refugee camps, something they did not begin to do during the Second Intifada until March 2002, way after the violence that began in September 2000 was well underway.
While feeling the need to draw historical parallels is understandable – and, as Burns said, there are similarities – this parallel is far from exact.
THOSE LOOKING to compare what Israel is going through now with periods of the recent past might, instead, want to look to a different period: the days preceding the Rabin assassination in the fall of 1995.
It is there – in the toxic atmosphere that prevailed at the time, when the government moved full speed ahead with plans that would profoundly affect the lives of everyone while half the country was passionately opposed – that perhaps closer historical parallels can be drawn.
Here, too, there are obviously tremendous differences between then and now, but these are differences that one could argue makes the atmosphere today even more charged and ripe for political violence. In 1995 there was no Twitter or Facebook, social media – and its ability to amplify extreme positions – did not yet exist. Today it does, and is contributing mightily to the spread of the vitriolic rhetoric being spouted by both sides.
In the days leading up to the Rabin assassination, there were mass rallies against moving forward with the Oslo Accords, and there was talk of din rodef, the concept in Jewish law of the permissibility of killing someone before they try to kill you.
There was also a vote in the Knesset on Oslo II, which created Areas A, B and C in the West Bank and gave the PA broad responsibilities in governing parts of those areas. This was a hugely significant vote. It passed by a razor-thin 61-59 majority with the help of Alex Goldfarb, a renegade MK originally on the Right who supplied the necessary vote after being promised a Mitsubishi and a driver in his role as deputy housing and construction minister.
A month after that vote, Rabin was assassinated. There are some striking similarities today.
TODAY, AS was the case in 1995, hundreds of thousands of people are protesting against government steps that they feel will dramatically change the country for the worse.
Today, as then, there are those talking openly about the possible need to kill the prime minister to save the country. Today, as then, din rodef has seeped back into the public discourse. Today, as then, there are those comparing the prime minister to Hitler. Today, as then, there are calls for massive civil disobedience. And today, as then, there are those who openly express a willingness to take up arms.
Hagai Tal, who was head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operations branch during the period of the Rabin assassination, said in a rare radio interview this week that both the public atmosphere and the stakes of what is at issue are reminiscent of the supercharged summer of 1995.
“Things are going in the wrong direction, and I hope for compromise, a way that will join together the different sides. Everyone is certain that they are right and the other is wrong, and – like always – the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
Asked if he thinks a political assassination could happen again in Israel, he replied that he believes it could. “First of all, because we have the painful experience of 1995, and if it happened then, it could happen today. The discourse is more extreme than ever, and social media – which was not around in 1995 – only fans the flames and turns into a blitz of comments, and reactions... I certainly think that someone, in the end, could get confused and try to save the motherland, in one direction or the other, and do something. And then woe unto us.”
Tal said he believes that Netanyahu, because of the tight security around him, is less in danger from a sole assassin. “I am less worried about that situation, but don’t forget there are many people in positions who are leading the [judicial reform] processes or opposed to the processes.”