Extreme Events — Both Sides

In partnership with

Extremists
on Both
Sides

An analysis of
political activity
across Israel’s
political camps

In recent years, Israeli citizens have become divided into two opposing political camps, made up of groups with different political positions and goals.

Both camps include groups that bring their political causes into the public sphere through on-the-ground action. This project focuses exclusively on those groups.

Because of their on-the-ground activity, these groups are often seen as representing the political extremes of the two camps.

Each square represents a physical political action carried out by one of the groups. Hover over a square to view the event description and scale.Press and hold a square to view the event description and scale.

The event descriptions and dates come mainly from ACLED, an international research organization, and partly from the HaMivtzar database. Assignment, classification, editing, and translation were carried out as part of the project using OpenAI language models. See the legend for details.

The events shown took place from the beginning of 2023 to the present day.
Groups can be filtered using the legend.

The camps differ in the number of actions they carried out, but those actions vary greatly in scale: some involve a single person, while others involve hundreds of thousands of participants.

For a numerical comparison, all squares are shown at the same size.
Use the button in the legend to display each event according to its scale.

Political actions vary in their goals, methods, and tactics. But there is not always agreement on where the line between legitimate and extreme action lies.

What do you consider a legitimate action, and what do you consider an extreme one?What is an extreme action to you?

Drag the types of action you consider extreme

Action types

In recent years, norms have eroded and lines have been crossed in Israel’s political struggles.

Ahead of the election, it is important to demand that those who ask for our trust set limits on extremism – including in the camp they represent.

This project was created in collaboration with

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Extremists on Both Sides

Data & Methodology

The dataset behind this project covers political actions carried out by Israeli citizens in public spaces, in Israel and the occupied territories, from the beginning of 2023: demonstrations, roadblocks, clashes, assaults, property damage, land seizure, and similar actions. Remarks, posts, and statements unaccompanied by action on the ground are not included.

Event descriptions and dates are taken from ACLED, an international research organization that documents protest and political violence based on reports from media outlets and local sources, and from HaMivtzar's settler violence log; an event appearing in both sources is counted once. Group assignments, action classifications, and crowd-size estimates were derived from the descriptions as part of this project. The descriptions were edited and shortened, and ACLED descriptions were translated into Hebrew, preserving the facts and the context in which the events took place. The English descriptions shown here were translated from the edited Hebrew versions.

Each event was assigned to the group that carried out its central action, not to those harmed or to the security forces that responded. When the group carried out several actions, the event was classified by the most severe one, using a severity ranking of ten action types built for the project with reference to existing severity indices. Assignment, classification, and translation were carried out with OpenAI language models, following instructions written for the project and refined over many rounds of review and manual correction.

The division into political groups is intended to enable comparison between the patterns of action of different camps. It does not imply that all members of a group act in the same way or hold the same views. The dataset also reflects what was reported, not everything that happened, and classifying political events is not always clear-cut.

Full methodology: sources, selection rules, classification, translation, duplicate detection, and the complete model instructions.

Research, design, and development: Eyal Raz (eyalraz.com)
Mentorship and guidance: Mushon Zer-Aviv
Journalistic advisor: Oren Persico
Thanks to Rakefet Canaan, the Shenkar School of Visual Communication, Shenkar - Engineering. Design. Art.
Thanks to the HaMivtzar team · Anat Saragusti, Miki Rosenthal, Amir Sperling, Ronit Antler and others
Database: ACLED, HaMivtzar