Hadar Muchtar is angry because Benjamin Netanyahu has won a sixth term as prime minister of Israel and she hasn’t won anything. Her party didn’t get a seat in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and it’s the fault of brainless old people. ‘I think that the citizens are stupid and we’re going to pay for that’, she says. ‘I don’t care about the government. I think they’re all sh*t. They’re horrible people all of them.’
Muchtar founded her party, Tzeirim Boarim, or Youth on Fire, to protest rising prices. She’s a 21-year-old from Kiryat Ono, near Tel Aviv, who became famous on TikTok for posting videos of her comparing the prices of things in Israel and Germany, where she spent a year as a university student. Inflation in Israel is 4.6 per cent, and homes are nearly 20 per cent more expensive than they were last year. On TikTok Muchtar has 130,000 followers, and before the election her party was polling at around 1.5 per cent.
After Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s government collapsed, Muchtar started to get invites onto Israeli TV. She speaks well — and loudly. But the hosts were often unsympathetic. They weren’t revolutionaries like her.They just asked whether her millionaire parents had paid for the helicopter she was renting for TikTok videos. And why she was turning up to the studio in a Mercedes? Someone rented a private investigator to follow her. ‘It’s really important that you will say that we have zero money’, Muchtar says to me. She insists that she doesn’t have any wealthy donors. ‘I think maybe I spent on this party, 10,000 shekels. It’s not a lot. But it’s something.’ It’s about £2,500.
The media attention broke Muchtar’s family. ‘There was like one week that all the media was telling sh*t about my family, about my father, about my brothers.’ She fell out with her parents, and now the family doesn’t speak to her. ‘I understand them and I love them and I admire them. I understand it was a difficult journey for them as well. I hope they will forgive me,’ Muchtar says.
The trouble Muchtar went through with the media has made her suspicious. She thinks there’s a conspiratorial ring at the top of Israeli politics. Someone or something is trying to keep her out. ‘Why, every time there is a new party, it doesn’t pass the threshold to get into the Knesset? Every time when there is a new party, something happens,’ she says to me. Politicians directed their friends in the media to attack her, she thinks.
Muchtar has spoken before about wanting every decision in Israel to be decided by referendum. (Even though she thinks the population are idiots.) Muchtar also talks about a ‘ruling elite’ who are brainwashing Israelis, and says that debates between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ are ‘bullsh*t’.
It makes her sound like a sort of populist. ‘I’m not, but I think I’m telling the truth’, she says, after a very long pause and a few hesitations. ‘This is why some people, the older ones, they don’t like me that much. I’m telling the truth and I think they are scared of the truth. They got used to living in a world that people control them, the media control them, the politicians control them.’
The television appearances, the TikTok following, the family drama, and, probably, interviews like this, all seem to have made Muchtar very self-aware. ‘A lot of people hate me, really hate me, and on the other side a lot of people love me’, she says. ‘I know I’m provocative. I know I’m an extremist sometimes. So you have a group that really, really hate me, and you have a group that really, really love me. I don’t think there is something in the middle.’ In another interview she said she was ‘here to make history’. She makes it sound normal. I’m not sure it is.
On Tuesday, election day, Muchtar tweeted that she had been attacked at the polling booth. ‘Just someone slapped me after I voted for my party. Someone recognised me and slapped my face’. She was live on TikTok at the time, so 1,600 people watched along. An hour later she was back in a helicopter, flying over the beaches of Tel Aviv and shouting through a megaphone at people who were below her.
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