Arab Israeli news anchor who was harassed by far-right mob: These are Netanyahu’s goons

A day after some 15 pro-government agitators showed up at her doorstep, Arab Israeli news anchor Lucy Aharish said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to blame and that his “goons” would one day turn on him.

“Maybe if he’s pressed he’ll agree to say this isn’t his way. But it’s precisely his way,” Aharish said Sunday in a monologue on her Channel 13 show.

“The balcony at Zion Square is here and now,” she added, referring to a speech by then-opposition chief Netanyahu at a right-wing rally in Jerusalem in 1995, a month before a Jewish extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for seeking peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s critics frequently accuse him of condoning calls for Rabin’s murder at that rally.

“It’s you again,” Aharish said. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who doesn’t see, doesn’t hear, doesn’t know what’s going on under his nose — doesn’t know what he himself wrought by his own hands, words and silence.”

“You, sir, are guilty. And until you call off your goons — and there are many of them — you are the leader of this mob,” said Aharish. “One day these goons will come to your doorstep. Who knows when they’ll turn on you?”

Aharish said the right-wing ideology espoused by the mob was a disgrace to that of Netanyahu’s predecessors at the head of the Likud party, and to that of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the party’s pre-state forerunner.

She noted that, where former Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir used to boycott Knesset speeches by Meir Kahane, Netanyahu’s government includes devotees of the racist rabbi.

“This is your right wing, Netanyahu: Violent, censorious, bullying and inciting. The right wing that has embraced Kahane’s legacy and given it the government,” she said.

On Saturday night, a group of men led by right-wing activist Mordechai David — who has repeatedly harassed government critics and has received overt support from ministers — entered Aharish’s Tel Aviv apartment complex with a megaphone and harangued her from outside her door.

David and another member of the group, identified in Hebrew media as Likud activist Rami Ben-Yehuda, were detained for trespassing and disturbing, and later released from custody and barred from approaching Aharish’s home, or contacting her, for a period of 14 days.

Speaking to Channel 13 News on Sunday, Aharish said the mob came to her home as her husband, “Fauda” star Tsahi Halevi, was putting their 5-year-old son Adam to bed. Among the slogans yelled by the mob, said Aharish, was “Bibi is king.”

“Tsahi and I jumped when Adam said, ‘Why are people yelling outside the door?’,” said Aharish. “We said someone was injured downstairs and mommy and daddy are trying to help him.”

“Then he saw me falling apart in the house, and he said to me, ‘Don’t cry, mommy. It’s okay, I’m here’,” she said.

“Does my 5-year-old kid need to calm down his mom?” said Aharish. “There is no forgiveness for what my child went through yesterday.”

She vowed to sue “each and every one” of the people who came to her doorstep.

Nor was that the first time her family had been harassed in their own neighborhood, according to Aharish. Just last week, she said, Halevi was at the supermarket with their son when two people came up to him, asked Halevi if he “doesn’t get that the right wing is the only solution,” and added: “We don’t get how you’re allowed to live in this neighborhood.”

Halevi, said Aharish, was a “hero of Israel” who had never missed a day of reserve duty as long as she’s known him, and who rushed to the Gaza border region to fight Hamas-led terrorists minutes into the onslaught of October 7, 2023.

Halevi fought in border communities amid the Hamas-led onslaught and is widely credited with saving dozens of lives. Aharish, who due to her high-profile position received multiple pleas for help from those trapped during the attack, is said to have helped direct forces to reach and rescue them.

Aharish said nobody from Netanyahu’s coalition had called her since the incident on Saturday.

If anything happens to her, her family or other journalists, she added, “the blood is on the hands of whoever was silent — it’s on the hands of whoever is on that balcony again.”