The meaning of the apology offered by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman after the crude tongue lashing he gave President Barack Obama on Aug. 5 regarding the Iranian nuclear agreement, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s swift disavowal of Liberman's remarks, goes beyond the arena of US-Israeli relations. One can assume that the political echelon will from now on be careful in mentioning the words “nuclear Iran.” Along with its Iranian enemy, the Israeli right is soon going to be losing its “American enemy,” Barack Hussein Obama. It will take a few months and several new West Bank settlement outposts before the next US president can be portrayed as an Israel basher. So who’s left?

Netanyahu has reconciled with Turkey and has kindly suggested that Israel’s Arab citizens should prosper. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is out for the count, and the Israeli left doesn’t count. How much mileage can Netanyahu get out of blasting Hamas and inciting against left-wing organizations? True, Netanyahu will always have Naftali Bennett, chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, as a punching bag, but a partner in the governing coalition, especially a religious Jew, cannot be portrayed as a true enemy. Therefore, once again the “leftist mafia” has been designated the role of Trojan horse.

“What if all the employees of the new public broadcasting corporation are members of the Breaking the Silence organization?” Netanyahu said at an Aug. 8 meeting with representatives of the public broadcasters Channel One TV and Israel Radio, the components of the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA). He claimed that the matter of the new public broadcasting corporation that will replace the bankrupt IBA had “escaped his radar” while he was busy with Operation Protective Edge against Gaza in summer 2014. In other words, even as Israeli soldiers were sacrificing their lives in battles with Hamas, the left-wing monsters dug a secret tunnel under the representatives of the people in the Knesset to infiltrate television and radio studios. What could be more “left” than Breaking the Silence, the organization that collects soldiers' testimonies on the Israeli military's behavior in the West Bank and elsewhere, spreading libel against Israeli soldiers to the heathens abroad?

The public readily swallows such conspiratorial messages. A poll conducted last year by the Ifat Group ahead of the annual journalism conference in Eilat, in December 2015, found that 63% of the Israeli public is convinced that the media leans left in covering issues of diplomacy. Its study, based on a review of 1,200 news items, opinion pieces, interviews and feature stories in leading media outlets, also indicated that the pervasive view that the media serves as a mouthpiece of the left is groundless. It showed that 26% of the work reviewed expressed opposition to an arrangement with the Palestinians, and 39% of the coverage was characterized as balanced. In other words, 65% of the coverage does not lean to the left. Only 35% of leading Israeli media coverage of diplomacy-related issues tends to support an agreement with the Palestinians.