Media caught staging altercation between Israeli ‘protesters’

Media operatives in Israel were caught on video last week staging an altercation between two opposing sides of the country’s judicial reform controversy.

A bill which passed its first reading in Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) last month seeks to curtail the unchecked power of Israel’s Supreme Court, whose Left-wing judges have served as an unbridled authority for the Left.

Israelis have become furiously embroiled in debate over the bill as Israel’s mainstream media relentlessly reports strong opposition to the proposal by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Right-leaning government. Protests, which are in their eleventh week, are joined by Left-wing politicians who are calling for civil war and a violent coup d’état in the name of democracy. One minister has been fired for calling for a halt to the legislation and hundreds of elite reservists have refused to show up for duty in protest of the bill.

Last week, someone captured media operatives on video orchestrating a fight between protesters for and against the judicial reform. The footage shows a camera crew and a man who seems to be directing a group of actors, including one who appears dressed as a Muslim, one who appears dressed as a religious Jew, and one woman dressed as one of the victims from the feminist drama series The Handmaid’s Tale, ostensibly to show how the judicial reform would somehow oppress women. While it is unclear what the man says to the actors, he also plays the role of peacemaker, pretending to break up the fight.

For some, the footage may be a reminder of the media’s strong influential role in creating conflict, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one example during 2020, media operatives staged a counter-protest by healthcare workers against anti-lockdown demonstrators in an effort to stir up support for the mandates. The photos that circulated social media showed nurses dressed in scrubs blocking a convoy of SUVs at an intersection. People in the vehicles held American flags out their windows and signs that said “Land of the Free” as they protested mandates. The nurses, all masked, were shown standing defiantly in the road, while an unmasked woman in an American flag shirt leans out her window and furiously yells at them to “go to China!”

But extra footage shows what appears to be a very similar convoy of SUVs stopped at an intersection as a cameraman, followed by a “nurse”, walks into the street when permitted to do so by the traffic light. The nurse stops in front of the car and holds up a sign for a few moments as the cameraman captures the scene from a few feet away. The nurse then lowers the sign and continues crossing the street with the cameraman, followed by another who calmly walks around the car. The passenger in the lead SUV holds out an American flag, obscuring their face.

In April 2020, as the media were launching their narrative about hospitals being overloaded with COVID-19 patients, CBS News was caught using footage from a hospital in Italy to show how “overwhelmed” hospitals in New York were becoming. It was later reported that then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sent away the USHS Comfort, a hospital vessel sent by President Trump to assist with the excess hospitalizations. Cuomo said the need for it did not match projections.