Zionist Union MKs vociferously attacked Im Tirzu and Culture Minister Miri Regev (Likud) Thursday, following the group's publication of a video promoting Regev's intention to make government funding for cultural endeavors conditional on loyalty to the state.

The leftist politicians blasted the Im Tirtzu video, which targets "foreign agents" in the Israeli cultural scene, as incitement and labeled Regev the "foreign agent."

Opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog, meanwhile, likened the government-backed NGO Transparency Bill as well as Regev’s recent loyalty bill to McCarthyism.

“The beauty of Israeli artistic creation will always continue," Herzog vowed on Facebook. "The Israeli McCarthyism and the zeros who are leading it will disappear just as they disappeared in the United States. The question is when and how much it will cost us?” 

MK Tzipi Livni, head of the Zionist Union's Hatnua faction, asserted that “the foremost foreign agent in Israel is Miri Regev and the Israeli government." 

"Israel cannot be allowed to turn into a country that chases down those who dwell in it," she continued. "Im Tirzu is destroying Israel from within and isolating it from the outside world and it is being done at the behest of the government. Those who do not know how to deal with external enemies creates internal enemies. Those who do not know how to provide security provide hatred and divisiveness instead. The ugliness of the election campaign has turned into national policy with the help of Im Tirzu. We will fight this evil spirit until we win.”

Stav Shaffir couldn’t hold herself back from joining the fray either. On Thursday morning the Zionist Union MK launched a verbal offensive against Im Tirzu and the campaign against left-wing artists who subvert Israel.

Shaffir, using almost the exact same terminology that Miri Regev used to describe anti-Israel artists, labeled Im Tirzu an “organization of incitement." 

"The inciting organization of Im Tirzu is attempting to subvert the foundations of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.The perfect cooperation that currently exists between the fascist organization and the Minister of Education as well as the Minister of Sports and Culture, with the added cooperation of the strategist Moshe Kulghoff who is responsible for the inciteful philosophy of Im Tirzu, needs to end immediately." 

"We need to make Im Tirzu illegal and prevent their foreign agents in the government, such as Naftali Bennett, Miri Regev and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, from employing their ugly tactics against the citizens of Israel.”