1
They distract the discussion so that, as the years following late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination pass, the Left's ideas have been refined to one single word: "incitement." For many years, the dialogue between the nation's two parts has been one-sided: The Right argues with the Left, while the Left, in response, shrieks "Incitement!" As with any phenomenon, there are exceptions to the rule but they bear testament to the totality that relates neither to the claims of the conservative Right nor the foul fruit borne of the Left's colossal mistakes. There is no serious discussion between two legitimate positions, two streams, two worldviews; argument against argument, evidence against evidence, a question with a corresponding answer. Nothing. On one side, there is intellectual unrest, pondering, debate, tireless quoting of the opponents and the refutation of those quotes. But on the other side, there is contempt and disregard. And in instances where a response does register, it comes down to one word: "incitement" in all of its forms.
I do not take politicians into account – the Left has already exhausted that avenue. It doesn't count because politicians on the Right are public (and hated) representatives of those who, in the Left's childish narrative, robbed them of power and stole the state. I am not referring to this but rather to a philosophical, cultural, ideological, ethical discussion of ideas. In no place in the public sphere does such a discussion take place; not in the academia, in culture or the media; the Left is unwilling to engage in serious and in-depth dialogue as equals
Journalist Doron Rosenblum, formerly of the Haaretz newspaper, proposed "a constructive idea" to his listeners this week: "Stop quoting and disseminating opinions you cannot tolerate, merely to trill in the margins about your delicate reservations or shocked reactions. Do you not see that by doing so, you are serving as a sound box and a tool for dissemination? Stop being your enemies' useful idiots!" Here too, he would like to fashion social networks in the same mold as the academia, a closed monad busy engaging in an internal dialogue with itself.
2
It just the past two weeks, the opening of the Knesset's winter session and Rabin's memorial ceremony provided us with examples that had one thing in common and that this that they were focused on having spokespeople on the Left focus on the same theme: We are not you, not because we adhere to a different ideology or life philosophy, or because the basic principles of your worldview are wrong for one reason or another, but simply because you are not OK and focused on "inciting."
One young lawmaker published the following aphorism on social media: "The only reason we are being told this week that it no longer matters who incited and encouraged the murderous violence against Rabin is because that person is the man who now heads the government. Someone whose career was built on hate, who has no values and restraint, and we will continue to say it because it is the truth – blood on his hands."
Read that again. Zionist Union MK Stav Shaffir has determined the prime minister has "blood on his hands." Whose blood? Rabin's of course. If we take her definition seriously, we could say that the person trying to bolster their status among her voters on the basis of such statements is in fact "building her career on hate." She is also building it on lies.
The prime minister's remarks have been out in the open since he first graced the public stage. There is not one example in which Benjamin Netanyahu has been seen or heard "encouraging murderous violence against Rabin," in other words, encouraging murder! There was a difficult and heated argument that touched the very essence of our existence here. Within the framework of this argument, difficult things were said by both then-Opposition Leader Netanyahu and Prime Minister Rabin, but they did not include not a call for violence. There is enough footage in which Netanyahu can be seen silencing his supporters, telling them not to use the term "traitor" when talking about Rabin. Never mind that there was absolutely no call for violence. So, "blood on his hands"? Can a person who published such false and slanderous accusations claim to have "morals and restraint"?
3
One would be wise to compare the statements hurled at Rabin by the Right during the Oslo Accords era and the insults and slander now directed at Netanyahu every day. I do not buy into the assumption that Yigal Amir murdered Rabin because of "incitement" or "rabbis" – despite the fact that this claim has become a fixed convention in left-wing discourse. Those who make this claim do not necessarily demand truth, but rather seek to blame everyone on the Right for the assassination. This accusation only serves to push a majority of the public farther away.
As I see it, Amir is like the character Rodion Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's book "Crime and Punishment," an individualist who detests authorities – including rabbis (Amir thought he knew better than them) – and created for himself an internal world that justified such a terrible act as one aimed at redeeming the nation. (For experienced readers, I recommend examining the role of Amir's friend Margalit Har-Shefi and later his wife Larissa Trimbobler, as well as Amir's relations with both these women, against the background of Sonia Semyonova, another character in "Crime and Punishment" and Raskolnikov's relation to her.)
To say that Amir carried out the murder because of the voices of opposition to Rabin or because rabbis instructed him to do is like making claims about a writer, a spokesperson or elected public official on the Right – who does not know how to think independently, but to whom others dictate what to say and what to think. We encountered this asinine argument just this week regarding Culture Minister Miri Regev, but this is a typical claim made by the Left about the Right in general. Remember Israeli actress Anat Waxman after the 2015 elections? Voting for Netanyahu was irrational, the actress determined. "He simply pressed the "Say 'Arabs'" button and everyone crawled out of their holes … miserable people." And there are numerous more examples where that came from.
4
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud said that we tend to project our troubles, anxieties and spiritual frustrations; we see in the other what in fact can be found inside ourselves. The claim that keeps coming out of the Left, to the point that it seems as if they all just walked out of the same workshop, is that the Right incessantly incites. But anyone who consumes media or browses social media will find that in fact, this is true of the Left, which slanders and disparages and ridicules and blows up and insults and proves this or that about people on the Right and calls them names.
The attempt to call any and every harsh, controversial and even radical statement "incitement" is done with one goal in mind: to shut people up and nip public debate in the bud and label the enemy "an inciter," in the hope that doing so will make the public at large to identify with the "moderate" camp that does not engage in incitement. What in fact actually constitutes incitement? Calling for violence or attempting to convince and pressure people to perpetrate a crime. In Israel, they like to include racist or anti-Semitic statements in the definition. A call for violence deserves to be punished, but all other statements, no matter how radical, should be protected under freedom of expression. True, this would result in public debate being full of unpleasant statements (though not necessarily anything worse than the current situation). But if we allow people to blow up linguistic steam, incidents of physical violence could certainly decrease. In general, those who have their mouths forced shut tend to use their hands.
But this actually goes much deeper. If we want to demand truth and examine in depth the various opinions being floated in the public discourse, there must be broad freedom of speech and freedom of expression provisions, to the point of endangering the opponent and pushing them into a corner. It is in this manner that we will make the opponent want to overcome the challenge presented by the harsh statement and respond with an even sharper answer. And so on and so forth. We cannot surrender to manipulative use of "incitement." We must speak the truth.
