A week ago Sunday, as a friend and I came out of a marvelous concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Jerusalem and started looking for transportation to take us home, a taxi stopped at our side, and its middle-aged driver agreed to take us to where we were heading.
After we settled in the taxi and agreed on the price of the trip, I suddenly noticed a miniature television switched on near the driver’s seat, tuned to Channel 14, that was broadcasting the channel’s popular program – The Patriots.
When I showed interest, the driver turned to me and stated, “I usually listen to Channel 14, but I also listen to the other channels. However, Channel 14 is the only one that tells the truth – the rest of the channels all tell lies.”
Instinctively, I commented, “Netanyahu also tells lies.” That turned out to be a terrible mistake.
The taxi driver reacted by raising his voice, and yelled for the next 15 minutes (perhaps more), without stopping, a tirade of sheer anti-left, anti-Ashkenazi hate talk.
His immediate reaction to my superfluous comment was, “You left-wingers don’t know how to argue: all you can say is ‘Bibi.’ But Bibi is the best – no one can compete with him.”
Then he went on to accuse the Left of destroying the country and trying to take it away from its true owners: the Right.
“But you are just a handful,” he said, “and you will lose the next elections big time.”
He continued to say that the Left are all traitors and should simply leave the country: “Why don’t you move to Dubai?”
I kept my mouth shut, but had I answered, I would have told him that I was born in Mandatory Palestine (Land of Israel) in 1943, that this is my home, and at the age of 82, I have no plans to move anywhere, except for the Har Hamenuhot Cemetery when the time comes.
The taxi-driver then moved on to attack Supreme Court Justice Isaac Amit, whom he insisted on calling a crook and a criminal, who had stolen the position of President of the Supreme Court. In fact, according to Israeli law, the most senior Supreme Court justice is automatically elected as its president when the position is vacated, as Amit was when he was legally elected to the job in January 2025.
Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara was his next target, whom he referred to as a wanton woman who refuses to fulfill her job of supporting the government and instead does everything in her power to prevent it from governing.
In fact, the attorney-general’s job in Israel is to act as the authoritative interpreter of the law; the head of the state prosecution, in charge of the enforcement of the criminal law; the person in charge of representing the state in court, unless he/she disagrees with the government’s position on a particular issue; the legal adviser to the government and the state authorities; and the representative of the public interest, by ensuring that the law is upheld.
I believe Baharav-Miara fulfills these tasks perfectly.
The taxi driver then went on to attack all the Jewish leaders of opposition parties – whether Right, Left, or Center – accusing them of treason, of being antisemitic and/or anti-Zionist. Only in the case of Yashar! leader Gadi Eisenkot did he get confused, since, despite his name, Eisenkot is of Moroccan origin (and thus “one of us”), so the taxi driver ended up commenting about Eisenkot’s short neck instead...
If the whole episode were not so absurd to start with, this particular comment would have been hilarious. But the sad truth is that this performance was simply a manifestation of the deep and blind hatred of various parts of the Israeli Right against the predominantly Ashkenazi Left and Center.
Hate is dangerous
I can still remember graffiti in Jerusalem, in the 1970s, stating that “the Nazis should have finished you [the Ashkenazim] off.” There are historical reasons for this hatred, and some of them might even be understood and sympathized with. But responsible right-wing leaders should try to lower the flames – not delight in them, as many seem to do, including our Ashkenazi prime minister.
Incidentally, nothing the taxi driver shouted out was original, though part of it was much more extreme than expressed elsewhere. I have heard all of the arguments –in one form or another – on Channel 14 and elsewhere.
The friend who was with me in the taxi kept begging the driver to stop shouting, because the noise was unbearable, but he simply ignored her, until, a little before we arrived at our destination, he went silent.
After leaving the taxi with my friend, without saying a word, I regretted that I had not recorded the horror on my cell phone and had failed to write down the taxi’s license plate number.
But even though this was not the first time in my life I had witnessed such vicious hatred, I must admit that I was in a state of shock. My friend wrote to me a few days later: “This encounter was the worst I have ever witnessed.”
Incidentally, the hate talk I am usually exposed to is personal and the result of the opinions I express in my journalistic articles.
Even before the age of talkbacks and social media, back in March 1995, after a notice appeared in The Jerusalem Post about the death of my eldest daughter in an accident in Chile, giving the exact time and location of her funeral, I received a hateful phone call. After making sure I was on the line, the male voice on the other side of the line blurted out: “You left-wing piece of shit – we are so happy.”
Thirty-one years later, the voice still resonates in my ears. At the time, I tried to get former HaTehiya MK Elyakim Haetzni to publicly condemn the specific event, but even though he was extremely empathetic towards me in a long telephone conversation we held, he refused, because the identity of the caller was never discovered (the police tried to help, and went so far as to put a tap on my phone – but to no avail).
Naturally, personal manifestations of hatred are usually more painful to the individual concerned than general manifestations of hatred.
But which of the two is more dangerous?
The hate campaign against former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin resulted in his assassination on November 4, 1995. But group hatred can also be dangerous and deteriorate into civil or interstate wars.
These are all issues that ought to be dealt with inter alia by the education system, but unfortunately, our education system is currently having difficulty coping even with more mundane issues, such as teaching English and mathematics.
Furthermore, the current government is not focused on reducing hatred, for the sake of unity, or for any other purpose.
The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. From 1994 to 2010, she worked at the Knesset Library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.