Israeli lawmakers and government ministers warned Sunday that the kind of political violence which marred a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania Saturday could be headed for Israel, potentially leading to the assassination of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Sunday, coalition secretary Yossi Fuchs presented government ministers with a video highlighting a number of death threats made against Netanyahu amid the ongoing anti-government protests.

The protests, which began with Netanyahu’s indictments in November 2019 even before the current government’s judicial reform plan sparked a popular left-wing backlash, have been accompanied by a rise in threats of physical violence against the Israeli head of government – a pattern some lawmakers warned mirrored the period leading up to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.

“The incitement today is eighty times more severe than before the assassination of Rabin, and I say this as someone who was responsible for rehabilitating the security system after Rabin’s assassination,” tweeted Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who one headed the Shin Bet internal security agency.

“The incitement here comes from someone who was a bodyguard of the Prime Minister, from senior Air Force officials and a retired General.”

The video presented to government ministers also included public statements by protest leaders calling Netanyahu a “traitor,” and “enemy of the people,” and “the worst enemy of the Jewish people in the last 2,000.”

Some of the threats also targeted Netanyahu’s voters.

“Every Bibist deserves a bullet in the brain,” one suspect said.

One speaker at an anti-government rally said the war on Hamas was relatively minor in importance compared to the “real war” against “Bibi Netanyahu and his government.”

After the near assassination of Trump, in which a bullet struck him in his right ear, only inches away from a potentially fatal hit, ministers warned that

“It is a miracle that what happened in the United States did not happen until now,” said Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a frequent target of rowdy demonstrations during the efforts to pass his judicial reform plan last year.

“We warned that this could happen here. The judiciary abandoned the Prime Minister.”

Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, blamed Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life on political delegitimization of the former president, adding a similar process was underway in Israel targeting Netanyahu.

“In Israel, there is an identical campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu, which is entirely protected by the attorney general and law enforcement just because it originates from the ‘right’ side of the political divide,” Chikli tweeted.

Image - Reuters