When an assailant vandalized the office of Channel 12 news last week, smashing the door and leaving a note reading, “Someone will die,” it drew condemnations from the outlet, media advocacy organizations and politicians, including some who accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of inciting attacks against the press.

The shock, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for surprise. This was the latest in a string of physical assaults on press outlets that frequently air criticism of Netanyahu. Channel 12 had been attacked earlier in July, possibly by the same man, and so had the Haaretz newspaper, whose door was likewise smashed. Channel 13’s office was graffitied with the slogan “The blood of the traitors will be cleared for publication,” paraphrasing a term generally used by the IDF when it announces the deaths of soldiers.

The attacks — and their death-threat rhetoric — also point to a problem that scholars, observers, surveys and even President Isaac Herzog have been raising with increasing alarm as Israel’s October 27 election nears: The country’s public discourse and political culture, across the ideological spectrum, is growing increasingly toxic — and possibly even endangering Israeli voters.

Those with their eye on this crisis aren’t mincing words: In a televised address to the nation, Herzog pleaded with citizens not to turn “rivals into enemies,” reminding them that “elections are not a “civil war” and warning of “dangerous violence rearing its head across the country.” The author Yossi Klein Halevi told The Times of Israel that the next government will face a “spiritual challenge” in trying to heal Israel’s rifts.

A recent poll found that 39 percent of Israelis ranked “violent conflict between groups” in Israel as one of the country’s leading threats, alongside a nuclear Iran.

“It’s violent in that you disqualify the other side just because it’s the other side,” the survey’s lead author, Yuval Eylon told the Times of Israel. “We have examples from both sides — some are more extreme or less extreme, let’s say — where you’re ready to torch the door of a newspaper [office] or — I don’t know about using a firearm — but definitely to punch someone.”

He added, “We’re already there, so it isn’t far away: Today it’s a fist, tomorrow it’s a baton, the day after tomorrow it’s a knife, and after that it’ll also be a gun.”

Eylon, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said Israeli societal discourse is “much more violent” today than it was before the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Last week, a 75-year-old activist with the upstart Yashar party was attacked and suffered a brain hemorrhage for taking down a banner supporting Rabin’s assassin.

Turning ‘schism into policy’

The anti-Netanyahu parties, and many of their supporters, lay blame for this inflammatory discourse at the prime minister’s feet, pointing to the far-right politicians in his cabinet (including a national security minister who had previously been convicted of incitement and supporting terrorism), in addition to the provocateurs his lawmakers hang out with, and the mass Haredi anti-draft protests that his coalition partners endorse and that have targeted the homes of public officials, sometimes destructively.

Klein Halevi said that he faults Netanyahu for having “turned schism into policy,” especially given the legacy of the Rabin assassination. Netanyahu’s critics accuse him of having fomented the incendiary discourse leading up to the assassination, which he denies.

“A growing feeling that people like me who have been in the opposition have had is that our physical well-being was being threatened by our government,” said Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That’s new. And this government — and I’m speaking specifically about Netanyahu — saw its political success as dependent on turning one part of the country against the other. That’s how it activated its base.”

To be sure, fears of growing political violence are coming against the backdrop of the unprecedented levels of bloodshed that have already scarred the country, both within and beyond its borders, over the past few years. In addition to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and the subsequent multifront war, the Arab community has seen record levels of violent crime. Settler riots in the........

© The Times of Israel