Activist Shikma Bressler at rally: Suspected racist attackers in Jaffa have ‘jihadist ideology’

Anti-government activist Shikma Bressler, who hoists an Israeli flag as she emcees an anti-government rally at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, says after a speech by Arab activist Somaya Bashir that Israel must choose whether to be a “Jewish, liberal democracy or a backward, jihadist dictatorship.” She leads the crowd in chants of “Democracy.”

She later says the suspected assailants in a racist attack on a pregnant Arab woman in Jaffa — reportedly Hilltop Youth banished from the West Bank for racist violence there — represent a “Jihadist ideology” and aim to “delegitimize people like us, who think differently from them.”

Other speakers rail against the government for its bid to codify sweeping exemptions for Haredi men from military service and to avoid forming a state commission of inquiry into the failures surrounding the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.

Rafi Ben Shitrit, a former Beit She’an mayor whose son Elroi was killed fending off the attack, says a state commission of inquiry is crucial to national rehabilitation.

“We have to come together and demand a return to ourselves, to our values — a Jewish democratic state led by the values of mutual accountability, responsibility, social solidarity and truth,” he says.

The rally ends after Ben Shitrit lights a menorah for the seventh night of Hanukkah.