‘Bibi to the gas’ spray-painted on Tel Aviv yeshiva high school

An Orthodox high school in Tel Aviv was vandalized in an apparent hate crime, with slogans discovered early on Monday calling for the deaths of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and right-wing Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett.

“Bibi to the gas,” read one of the statements daubed on the walls of the Bar Ilan yeshiva for arts and sciences, a religious high school for boys on Rothschild Boulevard.

Another slogan daubed in black said, “Kahane is dead!” in reference to the far-right rabbi-politician Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990. Alongside it, in red, was the phrase: “And what about Bennett?”

The vandalism also recommended to “free Palestine,” and declared, “No pride in Apartheid.” The words “Antifa Zone” were also scrawled on the building, a reference to the far-left American protest movement.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Jewish Home party, accused the media of failing to highlight the vandalism.

“A hate crime calling for the assassination of the prime minister and education minister on the walls of a school in Tel Aviv and for the Israeli media, it’s like it didn’t happen,” wrote Shaked on Twitter. “There are no push [notifications], no widespread coverage. Why are hate crimes only covered when the victim is on the left?”

The Tag Meir anti-racism group came to plant an olive tree “as a symbol of peace and tolerance” with the school’s principal, Rabbi Benny Perl, the group said in a statement.

“We condemn all hate crimes and we came to the yeshiva in Tel Aviv, just as we come to any place where hate crimes and racism take place, in order to condemn, with disgust, the attackers and to strengthen those attacked,” said the chairman of Tag Meir, Gadi Gvaryahu.

Perl, in an earlier Facebook post, lamented sardonically: “If we were a mosque, Tag Meir would have come to give us a flower, the president would have come to carry the burden of his people, the media would have been compassionate and caressing… but we are a yeshiva.”

It was not immediately clear if the yeshiva had lodged a criminal complaint, with some Hebrew news sources reporting earlier on Monday that the school management was weighing whether to alert police to the vandalism.