Israel's US Election, and How Weaponized News Still Stokes Real Violence and Fear
As the US was going to the polls on November 5, the other democracy at stake in this election was rocked by news with excellent political timing: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sacked Defence Minister Yoav Gallant the same day.
“Oh, clever girl,” I found myself muttering—the Jurassic Park reference one of the few moments of levity I would enjoy that week. Although Gallant has been popular in Israel as a check-and-balance against Netanyahu, what might otherwise have been a big news cycle in the West was engulfed by election anxieties.
Gallant and Netanyahu have had bad blood for a while, with Netanyahu trying to sack Gallant in March 2023 when the latter expressed public concern about Netanyahu’s attacks on the judiciary—a site of mass protests from Israelis for most of the year. In recent months, the two have clashed over Gallant pushing for a hostage deal and the conscription of a class of Israeli citizen exempt from active IDF service: a group tied in part to far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition. With Gallant out of the picture, Netanyahu can appease his far right cohort and continue his war with less internal pressure to consider strategies that centre negotiations.
And according to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu is just getting started:
He is ridding himself of the gatekeeper of Israel’s military integrity and interests. At a cabinet meeting on Monday, not incidentally, Netanyahu also reportedly asked his justice minister to find a “solution” to the infuriating Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a vital gatekeeper of Israel’s democracy, who has repeatedly told him that his efforts to maintain the exemption of the ultra-Orthodox from military service are illegal. If she, too, is removed to be replaced by a sycophant, there will be nobody principled and potent, and nothing but our embattled judiciary, to challenge his absolute authority.
The prime minister may also now set about ordering a changing of the guard in the security establishment, with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet head Ronen Bar at the top of the list. His acolytes have tried ever since the Hamas massacre to shift maximal blame to the security establishment and away from the Netanyahu-led political echelon.
When Netanyahu sacked Gallant, Israelis again reacted with protests, because there has always been a strong fight from within against this far-right coalition, headed by a corrupt politician with a long history of catering to extremists, spreading propaganda, and financial malfeasance (this last, embodied by court cases that the country is still struggling to complete; we’ll get to the “spreading propaganda” part in a bit).
Israel lost its standing as a liberal democracy this year, thanks to Netanyahu’s right-wing attacks on core institutions (it’s now only an electoral democracy by that global metric), but depending on how things went in the US election on November 5, many had hoped that a Democratic win wouldn’t just save the US from its own corrupt right-wing; it might also give Israeli citizens the international leverage necessary to empower change from within. This is because a parliamentary system can rearrange itself whenever there’s no confidence in the leading coalition. However, so long as Netanyahu has strong ties internationally, it’s harder for pluralist democracy to do what it does best: mitigate hardliners with its own institutional checks-and-balances.
We all know that November 5 didn’t turn out for the best, though—and some might have already seen how thrilled extremists in Netanyahu’s coalition are with the news of the Republican win. Netanyahu paired his Likud Party with a slew of messianic extremists to stay in power in December 2022, and Bezalel Smotrich in particular couldn’t be happier at the idea of a US president who can be persuaded to “let” him annex the West Bank the way he’s been empowering citizen militias to do all year.
Elsewhere, we know that the incoming US president, from here on called “47” because I’m as tired of seeing his name everywhere as most of us, has already pledged to give Netanyahu access to munitions transfers Biden withheld. Some political strategists note that 47 is impatient with war and wants to see Netanyahu wind these wars down quickly, but Netanyahu is scheming around that issue, too. He’s preparing a political “gift” for 47 in January, around Lebanese operations. Fighting will continue throughout the rest of Biden’s term, so that this PR stunt serves its main aim.
(Unsurprisingly, too, ultra-Orthodox Jewish persons, like Christian Evangelicals, overwhelmingly voted for 47: In Ramapo Precinct #55, in New York, the vote was 99.79% Republican; in Palm Tree, Orange County / Kiryas Joel, New York, 98.4%. The connection between Christian Evangelicals and Jewish messianics was solidified with 47’s introduction of end-times fanatic Mike Huckabee as the new US ambassador to Israel. His “one-state solution”—all Israel—is what regional extremists want as well.)
Meanwhile, we’re already hearing normalized the idea that the IDF will be in Gaza for all of 2025 as well. With Gazans denied return to the north, where starvation conditions have deepened for remaining civilians, a few grim outcomes are all but assured: the best case for Palestinians is being further driven from their homes than they already have been; there will be no full accounting of all the dead in the rubble once extremists start moving in; and it will take a great deal of creative global action simply to spare the lives of everyone else.
Israel’s domestic struggle for press freedom
And yes, I’d love to be proven wrong. This is a miserable state of affairs, which does not speak to our species being anywhere near the level of “civilization” it affects.
But this past year, I’ve been living in a painful schism, while following Israeli news and also news in the West about Israel and Gaza—and that schism was definitely heightened around the US election. For some reason, it has been very difficult for many Westerners to grasp Israeli politics, even when the English-language newspapers have made the struggle plain as day. While many US citizens spent the last few years deeply concerned about the rise of religious and other far-right extremists in their own government, there has been a deep level of cognitive dissonance around the threat of such forces to democracies elsewhere.
Partly, this is because of a phenomenon I’ve been calling “polite antisemitism”. It’s as if some people cannot or are afraid to see Israelis and Jewish persons as more than a hivemind—and so, they leap to show everyone else that they are “for the Jews” or “pro-Israel” in the most reductive way possible, by taking the most militant position in this broad spectrum of cultural and political beliefs for granted, as if it speaks for all.
Meanwhile, within the country, as I’ve written about many times before, I’ve seen the struggle of Israelis with the far-right extremism in their government; and I’ve noted how often citizens are whipped into a greater level of war derangement from domestic news and the general chilling effect of life under such political rule, which to this day is fighting to destroy democratic checks-and-balances and intimidate Israelis into compliance with extreme right-wing spin. Israel under this Likud Party is a horrific case study in how hate and dehumanization are normalized by environment—and an incredibly important one for Westerners to take note of, because it’s what faces our own societies, as far-right extremists gain stronger holds there, too. They are us. We are them. And it’s going to get a whole lot worse for all of us before it gets better.)
In the case of media, thankfully, many local outlets—on the left, in the centre, and even sometimes in papers I consider to be more Likud-propagandist than anything else—still report on problems in their government, despite how much Netanyahu’s coalition has been trying to boost right-wing voices and suppress domestic media critical of official actions. Below, we’re going to talk about one recent example in which Israeli media did a better job reporting on the awfulness of its own citizens abroad than international media—but it cannot be overstated how much domestic journalists are fighting an uphill battle in general.
In August, for instance, the Knesset convened for a late-night vote not related to any pressing war emergency, but to pass the “little bribery law”, as a follow-up to the “big bribery law” from a few weeks prior. These corrupt bits of legislation earned their colloquial names from offering regulatory exemptions and financial perks to Israel’s version of Fox News, Channel 14: a truly deranged news outlet where you’ll find the most hateful exterminationist debates—and of course, nothing but praise for Netanyahu, along with talking points for his supporters to use when trying to “explain” local events to Western audiences. Although there are articles about these laws from left-leaning Jewish diaspora news, it’s worth noting that even Israel’s right-of-centre Jerusalem Post reported on related concerns about Channel 14’s platform.
Side note: What adds to my frustration, when switching between media spheres, is seeing how much Likud supporters will readily parrot Channel 14 rhetoric to Western audiences who have no idea how bad this source is, but trust the intermediary enough to accept whatever is shared without question. As a general rule, I strongly recommend caution when someone doesn’t link to or at least name their sources, and even more so when someone tries to tell you that their position is the only one of note. Mine sure as heck isn’t—have you seen how clearly left-leaning I am in my pro-pluralist democratic beliefs?—so you’d better be reading my comments against a wide array of perspectives to get a full sense of things!
Nor was this the only time this year that Netanyahu has been tied to the manipulation of news for Jewish audiences, in Israel or diaspora. One of the most egregious cases happened in early September, when Netanyahu advanced an argument for holding the Philadelphi Corridor, at cost to a hostage deal and against military expertise within the country—and the next day, fabricated documents appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, Europe’s oldest Jewish journalistic outlet, that conveniently seemed to support his case, and were spread quickly by right-wing outlets. One of the most comprehensive write-ups on this mess, which outraged many Jewish journalists of integrity at the Chronicle when they found a plant in their midst, is in +972 Magazine—but I have to disagree with their generous comment in one section:
Some in Israel are pointing the finger directly at the prime minister. It is widely inferred that Netanyahu has for months been selectively leaking information to the Israeli media under the guise of a “senior Israeli official,” but this would mark a new stage in his attempts to deceive the public. The divisions in recent months between Netanyahu and the security establishment, including on the issue of the Philadelphi Corridor, have also been well documented.
Is it really a new stage?
Even +972 Magazine from 2021 would beg to differ—building on a track record that went back well over a decade when one author wrote,
Perhaps more significant, though, was his targeting of Israel’s media. Netanyahu sought to convince the Israeli public, and in particular his supporters, that the national media consists of left-wing propaganda outlets that perpetuate the oppression they experience as religious or Mizrahi Jews. As with much propaganda, a kernel of truth was distorted in order to plant a field of resentment, distrust, and blatant lies in the minds of many.
These attacks hit their mark: under pressure to prove their patriotic credentials, and financially starved to boot, mainstream media outlets resorted to lowbrow reporting and sloppy journalism while giving disproportionate airtime to non-newsworthy items that advanced Netanyahu’s right-wing agenda. Serious inquiry became a rare commodity that journalists struggled to publish.
Netanyahu’s mouthpieces
Nowhere is this clearer today than with Channel 20 (which is currently being rebranded into the more accessible Channel 14). Established in 2014 as a public broadcast channel, it was contractually obligated to provide “traditional” Jewish content. Following a legal battle, however, the channel was permitted to begin broadcasting news alongside its traditional content in 2018. Yet Channel 20’s news broadcasters and their content served to unabashedly boost Netanyahu — and continue to do so even now, under a new government. The channel suffers no consequences for violating its legal obligation to provide less news and more Jewish content, or for directing abusive, unbridled slander at anyone who challenges Netanyahu.
The more things change, etc.
One more local example
I know I’m getting into the weeds with media literacy now, but before I move on to the latest awful example of how these political news games have grave consequences, I want to offer Westerners one more messy internal example of the struggle to retain some semblance of democratic society under a prime minister and coalition that seem very much intent on despotic rule. Yes, you might know about the law that allowed Israel to kick out Al Jazeera, and also try to dismantle the Associated Press, but this government’s hostility to any journalism not working in step with the right-wing war machine is widespread. So here’s how one other saga unfolded this year:
Channel 13 is a major Israeli news service with investigative journalists who have a strong record for holding politicians’ feet to the fire. Raviv Drucker has been responsible for stories like one earlier this year on transport ministry corruption—which brought police attention to the issue, and pissed off executives and government officials. The politician named in that case, Miri Regev, is on record as being against independent media. In 2016, she argued in support of Netanyahu’s postponement of a long-overdue new public broadcasting corporation, stating that “it’s inconceivable that we’ll establish a corporation that we won’t control. What’s the point?”
But her contempt for journalistic independence has its rivals, who came further out of the woodwork after that corruption report. Channel 13’s operator, Reshet Media, is majority-owned by a US-British citizen named Len Blavatnik, the second-richest man in the UK. In the past, he admitted to involving himself in media ownership at Netanyahu’s request. In June, Blavatnik backed Yulia Shamalov Berkovich—a former Knesset member allied with Netanyahu, and a well-known antagonist to TV journalists—for appointment as CEO of Channel 13 News. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Berkovich targeted Drucker’s famous investigative program for elimination soon after, despite its excellent ratings and popularity. This October, his program got a reprieve—but that same month, a private member’s bill from a Likud lawmaker sought to grant the government complete control over Israel’s television rating system.
The fight for control over on-air messaging continues.
So this is the news climate within the country, which makes it extra important that some Israeli media still advances fuller reports than its government wants—and all the more important for democracy advocates to pay attention and boost their work. Government spin wants to reach us first, but that’s not how democracies are saved.
The Amsterdam spin cycle, and real fears from them
I didn’t think much of it at first, then, when I read coverage from The Times of Israel on a clash between Dutch-Arab locals in Amsterdam with visiting Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv fans around a scheduled footie match, in a city with pro-Palestinian protests underway. It’s possible that my past exposure to how brutal these sports fans are also tempered my reading of this piece: Maccabi fans swarmed and beat a man in Athens earlier this year for holding a Palestinian flag, and these football leagues are just nuts in general when it comes to overall permissiveness around racist and xenophobic commentary. An even worse Israeli example is Beitar Jerusalem’s “La Familia”, which proudly calls itself fans of “the country’s most racist team”—and that last link is from 2020, a few years after Miri Regev (oh, hi again!) blocked attempts to label this group an unlawful association due to its rampant racist and violent anti-left remarks.
Now, TOI has a clear “side” when it reports on Jewish and Israeli events (as does everyone: don’t trust anyone who tries to tell you that they don’t), and many facts on the ground would take days to settle into the chronology we now have. However, right from the outset this Israeli centrist publication included a description of the Maccabi fans defacing private property and chanting “We’ll fuck the Arabs” and “Fuck you Palestine”, along with a visual link to a source that more clearly asserted horrific lyrics like “no schools left in Gaza because there are no children left”.
That said, I can’t find an archived copy of the TOI article from that day, so I’m side-eyeing its current title. It’s possible that the much more measured headline it has now, “Israel decries ‘pogrom’ in Amsterdam as Israeli soccer fans come under attack by rioters”, was switched out to replace a more sensational earlier one, because the URL (which is shaped by the original headline, unless adjusted) reads “pogrom-in-amsterdam-as-israeli-soccer-fans-come-under-brutal-assault-by-rioters”—a much more definitive claim that doesn’t couch the key term, “pogrom”, within a given political perspective. Still, TOI continued to publish reports of Maccabi fans having been boorish louts on the streets of Amsterdam, and highlighted a later official report that included descriptions of the violence for which Israelis were arrested the night prior to this action, along with the fully targeted nature of subsequent attacks.
Here’s an example of what mainstream Israeli media reported on November 12, creating a much more well-rounded—and thus, less incendiary and accelerationist— depiction of events than right-wing politicians wanted the world to believe were afoot:
The attacks on Israeli fans by local Arab and Muslim gangs after a soccer match in Amsterdam last week were a “poisonous cocktail” of antisemitism and hooligan behavior, mayor Femke Halsema said on Tuesday, as a report showed that ten Israelis had been arrested ahead of the soccer match that preceded the attacks.
Halsema was speaking at an emergency meeting of the Amsterdam city council days after the Dutch capital was rocked by violence last Thursday following an Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match.
Israeli officials said 10 people were injured in the Thursday night violence carried out by local Arab and Muslim gangs against Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans. Hundreds more Israelis huddled in their hotels for hours, fearing they could be attacked. Many said that Dutch security forces were nowhere to be found, as the Israeli tourists were ambushed by gangs of masked assailants who shouted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans while they hunted, beat and harassed them.
“Jewish Israeli supporters were guests in our city and they were sought, hunted and attacked via antisemitic calls on social media and on the streets,” Halsema said on Tuesday. “But Amsterdammers were also attacked by Maccabi hooligans who chanted racist and hateful slogans in our city,” she added.
Some video footage on social media showed Israeli fans singing anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian chants, apparently prior to the riots, pointing to high tensions and unrest even before the attacks.
…
Officials had expressed concerns “due to the aggression of Maccabi supporters” who had vandalized a taxi in the city Wednesday night, sparking online calls for taxi drivers to head to a casino where hundreds of Israeli tourists were gathered, though police managed to largely head off the clash.
…
Halsema said Jewish institutions in the city including synagogues were not targeted and the attacks were “purely aimed at Israeli Maccabi supporters.”
This is the kind of responsible reporting that highlights the gravity of a situation, and keeps politicians from having their way with any given news cycle—risking increasing tensions and fears for Dutch Jewish residents, and other European Jewish persons, in service to their own political wheeling and dealing for another country at war.
The word “pogrom” is very serious, and when individuals use it to describe personal fears, that needs to be taken seriously, too. It’s also fuel for the fire in the hands of right-wing extremists like Netanyahu and his cohort, and a variety of anti-immigrant European extremists like Geert Wilders, who had a field day with this news event—all without any real care for what their sensationalist language might exacerbate in the way of local fears and violence for Jewish and Muslim persons everywhere.
Locally, Amsterdam is just now healing from the frustrating whiplash of Western coverage, which picked up and ran with the most sensational parts of this news event, and is now hastily or quietly adjusting its original reporting. There was a moving address the other day by a local politician, Stephan van Baarle, who in his country’s halls of debate demonstrated that the Netherlands, at least, is still a resilient democracy and will recover from this ugly, brutal moment of international criticism.
Remembering the human
But I was maybe too impatient, and too frustrated, with Westerners credulously whipping around the sensational term “pogrom” last week, when Western media outlets signal-boosted certain facts and evidence well out of proportion from the rest.
Since October 2023, I’ve been clear about how the first casualty of war is truth, because governments at war do not owe anyone the truth over victory; and as such, I’ve written extensively about how the propaganda wielded in this war desecrates the memories of victims and accelerates more violence, more divisions, more demoralized democracies. So when I identify something as “malinformation”, I’m doing so from a place of deep familiarity with the state of wartime media manipulation—and with the keyboard warriors parroting Likud/Channel-14 talking points—that stirs up anger and fear well ahead of careful thought, leading to more death and destruction all around.
However, I’m not being a good humanist when I let my impatience get the best of me. Do I want other people to quit flattening Jewish and Israeli discourse to simplistic and singular points of view? You bet your bippy I do—because so long as this exhausting run of “polite antisemitism” reigns among Westerners, any chance of two states being able to scrape together stronger defences of their democracies is lost; and any hope for a third people being able to survive its slaughter at their hands is, too.
(And if you think that you couldn’t be as hateful as many militants are in the US and Israel right now, think again: it doesn’t take much more than corrupt control of the media, the judiciary, and other vital institutional checks-and-balances on power. A chilling effect sweeps across the land, dissent is treason, and the State comes first.)
When some spoke last week about how this event brought October 7 to mind again, they weren’t alone. For my reflection on the one-year anniversary, I outlined a terrible list of falsehoods that the IDF, first responders, and government disseminated about the dead in those early days—to the desecration of their memories, and to the denial of their families and communities being able to grieve what actually happened.
How We Remember Matters
The trick last year, for some of the spin-doctors using such unconscionable lies to advance their war, is that a sensational story doesn’t need to be true to yield truth. For trauma-ridden Israelis who were first told the most horrible falsehoods about their own people, it didn’t matter that these stories were eventually amended; what mattered is that they got to see how communities reacted when they thought that even more horrible things had happened. So many felt betrayed when they saw other people dismiss or even sneer at these tales of trauma, and in the wake of that feeling of betrayal, many leaned closer to their extremist right-wing government—the creator or perpetuator of those lies!—as the only entity “really looking out for them”.
A smaller version of that happened this time, too.
There are absolutely videos of Israeli Maccabi fans being chased and beaten on the streets of Amsterdam. There was also one very important early video of violence, by Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf, that was sold to media and spread widely once syndicated by Reuters. In early reports by the likes of The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, along with German and other European media, that video was presented as a depiction of Arab and Muslim locals chasing a Maccabi fan in a mob with wooden and metal implements. The truth was the opposite: as de Graaf clarified, it showed Maccabi fans chasing a local.
But you and I know full well that retractions never travel as well or as fast as the original clickbait—and one of the places that has yet to satisfy de Graaf with a retraction, Sky News, is also under fire for editing its initial footage to cut scenes of violence caused by Maccabi fans from its report.
Here’s the emotional truth, though:
If you think that human beings, once frightened and enraged by a video they believe shows violence in one direction, are going to switch to being frightened and enraged in the other direction, once they find out that the narrative is reversed, well…
You haven’t met many humans, have you?
The more important measure of “truth”, for many of us, is simply this:
How did others respond to my fear and anger, when I saw those first reports and was scared and angry? Were they there for me, when I was so sure that I might be in danger, too?
The answer to this deeply emotional first reaction to shocking news reports tells many people everything they need to know about how “safe” they are—and that leads them to support more extremist positions, once they’ve clocked everyone else as being less than 100% supportive of their immediate fear and concern. Yes, this time the reports might not have been quite what they were originally made out to be… but what if next time they are? Can anyone else ever be trusted to have their back again?
And boy howdy, were so many of those early reports crafted so well to amplify this fear! One, from The Jerusalem Post, continues to get my goat, because I know that this right-of-centre outlet can do more responsible journalism; it just also has a run of articles like “‘Jew hunt’: Rioters planned Amsterdam pogrom in Telegram groups in advance - report” that serve primarily to send fear down readers’ spines. In that piece, which might have originally been titled in a less click-bait-y way (the link carries an artifact reading “Telegram groups used to pre-plan attack on…”), the key claim is that plans were made “well in advance”, with zero description of what is meant by that term. Our chronology of events now involves Maccabi fans destroying a taxi on the previous night—not something that justifies beating humans, but which creates a more grounded picture than what one gets from the idea of taxi drivers talking to one another “well in advance”: a term that is terrifying on its own, because it could mean weeks, months… This is the kind of reckless journalism that leaves everyone feeling a lot less safe in their homes, wondering if they can trust any driver they meet again.
So, it was a bad week. More people died in Lebanon and Gaza, by the way—that’s always shuffled to the margins, isn’t it?—but also, I’m at my wit’s end with all the polite antisemitism (the flattening of Jewish and Israeli persons to the most simplistic hivemind subject-position), and its chilling effect around a body of complex media manipulation that only serves politicians eroding the vestiges of democracy everywhere.
A week and a half after the US election, we have two so-called democracies in bad straits, causing immense death, destruction, and disillusionment on their way down.
And I don’t know we fix the grip that mal-, mis-, and disinformation have over us.
I certainly don’t think it’s going to get any easier to overcome our immediate, knee-jerk responses to weaponized political news as the world gets hotter, and as resource wars and ethno-tribalism grow in lockstep with resulting migration pressures.
But whatever we do to try to keep pluralist democracy alive, however futile it might be, it has to start with centring our shared humanity—however little yet remains.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML