Published: 1 August 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“Did you know Ayelet Shaked appointed a leftist as director general of the Justice Ministry, a former aide to [former Meretz leader] Zehava Galon...Share because this time we can’t lose right-wing votes,” he posted.
Shaked, now heading a bloc of right-wing parties, is one of Netanyahu Sr.’s many nemeses in this election, and from his own strategic point of view, the prime minister has numerous reasons to attack her and her former director-general.
Ohana’s quick, obeisant response made obvious what many have long thought: Yair Netanyahu is much more than a social media activist with too much venom in his thoughts and time on his hands. Netanyahu Jr. is political player. He is kingmaker and unmaker, wielding a powerful influence on his father’s positions and nominations.
He is an integral, strategic part of his father’s election campaign.
As Netanyahu Sr carefully crafts an image of senior statesman, courting controversial right-wing world leaders, such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary, and US President Donald Trump, Netanyahu Jr fights his father’s enemies in the trenches of social media.
Over the past year, Yair Netanyahu’s tweets and posts have become increasingly frenetic – totalling an average of 69 posts per day, according to media watchdog, The Seventh Eye. They are also increasingly hostile, crude, and arrogant. Even a quick review of his social media activity shows that his barbed posts and ad hominem attacks are consistent with his father’s list of talking points and competitors.
While recent huge election posters show the prime minister with Trump and Putin, under the slogan, “Netanyahu is in a different league,” his son has been busy spewing out crass online posts that keep his father’s more extreme, right-wing voters happy, and gobble up his hatred of the left, hatred of Arabs, and hatred of elites.
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Yair Netanyahu is the proverbial canary in the mine, sent out to test the air quality. If a particular post or tweet doesn’t provoke too much of a negative reaction – as they did not when Ohana fired his director-general – then the prime minister can go ahead with whatever manoeuvre he is planning.
Only a few years ago, Yair Netanyahu, now 28, son of Netanyahu with his third and current wife, Sara, was presented to the Israeli public as a sweet, talented, upstanding young man in a happy and healthy family that lovingly spends Shabbat and holidays together.
But that was a hard sell, since Netanyahu’s escapades include late-night, drunk visits to prostitutes, nasty tweets, and vile rants on Facebook. So the PR machine surrounding Netanyahu tried to market him as the bad boy of the family.
Since completing his army service, where he served in the IDF spokesperson’s unit, Netanyahu Jr. has been living “at home” – that is, in the official Prime Minister’s residence, where he has a car and driver at his disposal and is accompanied by a security detail at all times, all at the public’s expense. Other than a brief stint at Shurat HaDin, a right-wing, aggressive legal NGO that aids victims of terrorism, he has never held paid employment.
Of his many escapades, the most notorious was Strippergate, in which recordings from a summer night in June 2015, released to the public in January 2018, reveal Netanyahu Jr. jumping from one strip-club to another in Tel Aviv, riding in a government car and accompanied by a bodyguard. Clearly drunk, he argues with a friend over a debt and jokes that he might have to pimp out his own girlfriend to cover his expenses.
Over the past year, Yair Netanyahu’s tweets and posts have become increasingly hostile, crude, and arrogant. Even a quick review of his activity shows that his posts and attacks are consistent with his father’s list of talking points and competitors.
Netanyahu Sr mildly chastised his son’s behaviour but noted that he is a “private person” – while failing to comment on the fact that the car, driver and security guard are financed by the public.
As a “private person”, his zeal to bash those he regards as enemies of the state – leftists, progressive NGO’s, the media, Arabs, his father’s opponents, and basically anyone who doesn’t agree with him – has grown stronger over time. Here are some of his more striking examples:
August, 2017: When both Trump and Netanyahu Sr declined, to condemn the flagrant anti-Semitism in the Charlottesville rally, Netanyahu Jr gave a clear explanation for this on his Facebook page. “I’m a Jew, I’m an Israeli, the neo-Nazis scums in Virginia hate me and my country...however, the thugs of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, who hate my country, (and America, too, in my view)....are becoming super-dominant in American universities and public life.” The left, he made clear, is the “real” enemy.
September 2017: controversial right-wing posts, including an anti-Semitic meme against billionaire philanthropist George Soros, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, anti-Netanyahu protest leader Eldad Yaniv and Meni Naftali, a former chief caretaker at the Netanyahus’ official residence who implicated Sara Netanyahu in a legal corruption case. It was later retweeted by David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Clan and praised by the neo-Nazi The Daily Stormer. The post was subsequently removed; the praise remains.
December, 2018: temporarily suspended from Facebook after posting a series of anti-Muslim posts. “Do you know where there are no terror attacks? In Iceland and Japan. Coincidentally there’s also no Muslim population there,” he wrote. He also called for “avenging the deaths” of Israeli soldiers killed by Palestinian gunmen. Facebook also deleted a post in which Netanyahu Jr. said he would “prefer” it if “all the Muslims leave the land of Israel”.
October 2018: he referred to journalist Amnon Abramovich as “a garbage can, stupid, and a Soviet propagandist...The Nation of Israel hates him.” This was one of several regular attacks on Abramovich, who was severely burned over all parts of his body while fighting in the Yom Kippur War and received an honorable citation from the IDF.
When criticised for this insult, Yair adopted his father’s usual tactic of going on the attack. He retorted on Facebook that Abramovich and the Israeli media as a whole “have been butchering my father’s personality, embarrassing him, belittling him, falsely accusing him, and drinking his blood with a straw for the past 30 years.”
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March, 2019: he posted nasty comments about President Rueven Rivlin on his Facebook page over his support for positive relations between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel. Rivlin is one of Netanyahu Sr’s archest enemies, and the prime minister did all he could to prevent his appoint to the position of president.
But Netanyahu Jr’s attacks came as Rivlin’s beloved wife, Nechama, was receiving a lung transplant and, in response, he was put on leave from the Shurat HaDin.He has not been reinstated. (Netanyahu claims that he asked for time off ahead of the election. Nechama Rivlin died of complications following the transplant in June, 2019).
Despite his sustained descent into the gutter, Netanyahu Jr is rumoured to covet a senior position in the Foreign Ministry and has begun to make waves in the international arena, too. Following the elections to the European Parliament, in late May, he tweeted congratulations to Viktor Orban, Brexit leader Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch right wing Party for Freedom, among others.
And last June, Netanyahu Jr was sent on a tour to the United States, although it is unclear in what formal capacity and who paid for his trip. In the US, he met with Katrina Person, a Tea Party activist and senior adviser for the Trump 2020 campaign. He also appeared at venues with conservative personalities such as Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Dennis Prager, Daniel Lapin, and even Mel Gibson, the devoutly Christian actor who infamously ranted anti-Semitic slurs at a police officer.
He gave what he claims to be his first TV interview to BlazeTV, an ultra-conservative channel far to the right even of Fox News, where he declared, “The Jewish people still remember King Cyrus the Great from Persia who recognized Jerusalem 2,500 years ago ... so we have a long-term memory and the vast majority of Israelis adore America and adore President Trump. He’s a real rock star in Israel.”
He must have made his Daddy proud.
Illustration: Avi Katz
