Welcome to the Israeli media’s whitewashing show—and above all, a display of their selective short-term memory: Raviv Drucker and Ben Caspit have appointed themselves as the kosher supervisors of Israeli political engineering. It is astonishing to watch the propaganda machine operate in real time: writing in Haaretz, Drucker excitedly diagnoses that “Abbas and Segalovitz are breaking down the walls of fear and separation between Jews and Arabs.” Drucker wax poetic over Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas, praising him as “the most impressive leader on the political stage.” No less.
Here is how the campaign works: take Ra’am, add former MK Yoav Segalovitz as a fig leaf, and serve the public a thoroughly laundered political narrative—clearing the path to integrate Mansour Abbas into a future coalition alongside Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Liberman, Yair Lapid, and Yair Golan. Then comes Ben Caspit with the usual clichés required when laundering such a cynical political maneuver. An extraordinary idea, a leader of historic proportions—look at that. Yet just a few years prior, Caspit spoke entirely differently about Ra’am and Mansour Abbas. How fortunate for the public that commentators like Drucker and Caspit are on hand to instruct us precisely when Abbas poses an existential danger and when he becomes a legitimate coalition partner.
There are no tough questions asked, no genuine scrutiny of underlying ideology. Pundits conveniently erase his refusal to explicitly condemn the Hamas terrorist organization, conceal the party’s structural ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and blur past inflammatory statements framing Jews as “invaders” in Jerusalem and Israel. They drip-feed legitimacy, instruct the public not to be afraid, and prime voters for the day after the elections. These are political propagandists masquerading as journalists—shilling for this disgrace and blaming the Israeli Right for October 7th while actively trying to usher the Muslim Brotherhood into the governing coalition.
The next time you transform a terror-sympathizer into a “historic statesman”—don’t call it journalism. Call it what it is: a political campaign.