By Noa Landau, December 4, 2022
Every few years, the Israeli right starts worrying that it’s no longer enough to curse the left with that hackneyed but effective term, “leftists.” Sometimes, rightists fear that the demonizing power of the original term has worn thin.
That’s when they pull out their doomsday weapon. Just like they did during the protests against then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or even the protests by Ethiopian Israelis, whenever the right wants to turn up the volume against a protest that is gaining support, they term the protesters, regardless of who they are, “anarchists.” Their goal is to undermine the legitimacy of the protesters and brand them “enemies of the state.”
That’s exactly why the right strove last week to turn members of the Bnei Avraham movement who had been attacked by Israeli soldiers in Hebron into “anarchists.”
