Stuart Winer is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits in the garden of his Jerusalem residence, 11 June 2012, after he injured his leg playing soccer earlier that day with Jewish and Arab youth in Jerusalem. The cast was put up for auction on the Internet in August. (photo credit: GPO/Flash90)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plaster leg cast went up for sale on an Internet auction website, with bids invited to kick off at $100,000.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sits in the garden of his Jerusalem residence, 11 June 2012, after he injured his leg playing soccer earlier that day with Jewish and Arab youth in Jerusalem. The cast was put up for auction on the Internet in August. (photo credit: GPO/Flash90)
The anonymous seller, identified only by the user name ‘saarg,’ but reported in Israeli media to be female, posted the unusual artifact on the Webidz site on Friday, and claimed that she obtained the cast from her mother, a nurse at Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. Netanyahu injured his leg playing soccer with Jewish and Arab youth in Jerusalem on June 11. The leg remained in a cast until August 5.
Saarg wrote that when her mother said the prime minister was coming in to have the cast taken off, she begged her to keep the discarded plaster so she could sell it.
“I thought it could be worth a lot of money,” Saarg wrote. “Lucky me, my mom kept the cast in a bag and brought it home.”
In her description of the item, which included no details of its aromatic state, Saarg explained that she hoped the sale will give a leg up to the social justice movement.
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“Bibi [Netanyahu] took a lot of money from people like me and my Mom for the last few years, it’s time to take some back,” she wrote and added that, in her opinion, social justice is about taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.
“This auction isn’t just an auction, it’s a poetic justice auction,” she declared.
As of Sunday afternoon, there had been no offers for the cast.
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