‘It starts at the top’: Extremist views are all that many young Israelis have ever known

By Kara Fox, CNN

Jerusalem (CNN) — On a bright Sunday afternoon outside of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem, a group of teenage girls was creating chaos.

“Bibi, Bibi, we love Bibi,” they yelled, using a popular nickname for the Israeli leader, as one spat into a “Bring Home the Hostages” hat before stepping on it in front of hundreds of silent protesters who had gathered to call for the hostages’ return.

Sixteen-year-old Sarah was among the teenage agitators who had skipped school to voice their support for Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, whose recent reignition of the war in Gaza has been criticized for endangering the lives of the 24 living hostages, and for serving as a distraction from the prime minister’s array of political crises. CNN is using pseudonyms for the teenagers featured in this article as their guardians were not present at the time of reporting.

“If we don’t do war right now, terror is going to come back again,” Sarah said, as her friends blared a song, “Bibi, Bibi, our friend,” through a portable speaker at pro-democracy protesters leaving another nearby demonstration.

Sarah said she supports Israel’s continued bombardment of Gaza and trusts that Netanyahu’s plan will ensure the best path forward for the security of Israel and her future – one she envisions without Palestinian participation.

“I don’t love any Arabim,” she said, using an English-Hebrew hybrid to refer to Arabs, who make up around 20% of Israel’s citizenry (another five million live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.) “I don’t have Arab friends because I know some day that they are going to cheat me, kill me,” she added, regurgitating the kind of inflammatory and dehumanizing rhetoric that many Israeli politicians and leaders have long normalized, but that has become more extreme since the start of the war.

“Those children will grow up to be terrorists,” Sarah said. Her friends nodded in agreement.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – among them 15,600 children – according to the health ministry there.

Days before, at another demonstration just outside of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Maya, another 16-year-old girl, went even further with her language.

“I think we should kill all of them,” she said, referring to Palestinians.

The teenager told CNN she supported US President Donald Trump’s call to relocate Palestinians in Gaza to third countries – a “voluntary” emigration plan approved by Israel’s cabinet on Sunday that critics say could amount to ethnic cleansing.

“It’s never been so bad,” Batya Kenine, a Jerusalem-based realtor, who had come to support the silent protesters in Jerusalem, said of the teenagers’ divisive rhetoric.

“When I was 18, I too voted for the most extremist party. They said: ‘We’ll fight, we’ll go, we’ll demolish.’ But I grew up and understood that’s not the way to live in this country – always fighting, fighting. People in Gaza, you know, they are human as well,” Kenine said.

The embrace of right-wing attitudes by Jewish Israeli youth is not a new phenomenon, analysts say, but it has become more extreme in recent years, particularly in the era of Netanyahu – who, having been in office for 12 of the past 14 years, is the only leader that teenagers like Sarah have ever really known.

“When you don’t resolve military conflicts, you have to convince your population of why you’re there, and then you have to convince them by telling them the other side is irredeemable, genetically disposed to be an existential threat,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a Tel-Aviv based political analyst, told CNN.

That messaging has resonated with many young Jewish Israelis, who overwhelmingly identify as right-wing, and who helped to usher in Netanyahu’s latest government, the most extreme in Israel’s history.

A large majority (73%) of Israeli Jews between the ages of 15 and 24 define themselves as right-wing, compared with 46% of Jewish Israelis aged 65 and above, according to research published in January 2023 by the Jerusalem-based think tank the Israel Democracy Institute, the most recent of its kind.

For many Israelis, that’s not surprising.

Alon-Lee Green, the founding co-director of Standing Together, a progressive grassroots movement, told CNN that young people aren’t at fault for the extremist attitudes that are dividing wider Israeli society.

“It starts at the top,” he said.

“Young people in Israel have never encountered a leader that says that we can go in a different direction, that says that there is an option to not go to war, to not deepen the occupation, to not deepen the conflict or violence with other people,” Green said.

Netanyahu has only ever paid the most perfunctory allegiance to the idea of a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, he has insisted that statehood would be a “reward” for the assault.

Those attitudes are trickling down to even the most left-wing parts of Israeli society, one mother of a pre-teen told CNN.

One mother, who asked not to use her name to protect her daughter’s identity, said that her 11-year-old attends a school in a liberal suburb of Tel Aviv, and that children in her class have thrown shoes or objects at maps of Gaza, and play games that include “death to Arabs” in the playground. On a school field trip to a local pool, one of her daughter’s friends said she wouldn’t enter the water after Palestinian children had swum in it. And when her daughter’s best friend asked who her mom was seeing – she is divorced and her partner is a Palestinian man – her child “froze.”

“She said to me: ‘Mom, I realized in that moment that I couldn’t say (his name) because they wouldn’t be my friends anymore.’”

Such attitudes are also reflected in online trends, promoted by young Israeli content creators.

In one of those trends, content creators mock the hardships faced by Palestinian children in Gaza by pranking their parents or grandparents by pretending to represent a fictional humanitarian organization asking for donations for Palestinian children. The parents normally react with outrage before the pranksters reveal themselves.

Other recent viral videos show Israelis making fun of Palestinians in Gaza unable to access water by running the tap and turning the lights on and off. Israel cut off the electricity supply to a desalination plant for drinking water in Gaza earlier this month, shortly after blocking the entry of humanitarian aid.

“When extremist narratives are something that you’ve been fed your entire life and when a moment of such extreme violence, like the Hamas attacks of October 7, happens… we see these trends of completely losing the ability to recognize humanity on the other side,” said Green, of Standing Together.

His organization, which has a large social media following, attempts to counter such rhetoric in the hope its message will spill out into wider society. On its social media platforms, the movement urges people to see Palestinians as fellow humans, as well as calling for an end to the war, through a lasting ceasefire and hostage deal, and reinforcing the understanding that there are innocent people “on the other side.”

But it is bombarded with “daily attacks on those truths,” said Green, who estimates that there are no less than “hundreds of thousands” of Israelis that have written vile and dehumanizing responses to the organization’s posts. Those comments come without consequence, he said.

Nobody is saying, “’Wait, maybe this is not a line we should cross’ – because other people are laughing with you,” he said, noting that no members of government – even from the left-wing opposition – are encouraging a stop to that type of behavior.

The Tel Aviv mom thinks that sort of pushback would force all of society – regardless of political allegiance – to reevaluate the way in which it operates.

Jewish Israelis are intentionally separated from their Palestinian counterparts, she said, noting that multiple human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes apartheid. Israel has denounced that characterization as antisemitic.

“If Israelis actually ever meet their other and understand they’re okay, then this whole plan, this whole invention, falls apart. And I think it’s the greatest fear of the government, but also the greatest fear of the people here: that they themselves would hate to wake up and understand that it’s all been for nothing,” she said.

Green believes that young people can change, arguing that the only way to counter extremism is to model a different kind of behavior for young people – and that protecting Palestinians and demanding peace is in Israelis’ own interest.

“We are the only ones that will determine what kind of a society we are. It’s not Hamas, it’s us,” he said.

As the Jerusalem demonstration began to wind down Sunday, some of the teenagers gathered close to compare notes on their favorite Taylor Swift songs while others yelled “Bibi, Bibi” at a group of pro-democracy LGBTQ+ activists leaving the rally.

One of the activists yelled back, “Enough.” The heckling carried on.

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