Likud rapped by rivals, disability official over ads assailing Gantz’s sanity
PM has become ‘a factory of defamation and ugly lies,’ charges Blue and White leader, whom ruling party has portrayed as mentally unstable
Likud campaign ads that seek to portray rival candidate Benny Gantz as mentally ill drew rebuke Wednesday, including from Gantz himself and from the State of Israel’s disabilities commissioner. It was not the first time Likud has raised hackles over campaign ads that appear to mock disabilities.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has lost all restraint,” Gantz charged in a speech Wednesday evening in Tel Aviv. “He has become a factory of defamation and ugly lies, because he knows he’s going to lose. He can continue to slander me and to spread rumors, it won’t help him.”
He added: “I knew this was coming.”
The Likud party released a series of campaign spots on Tuesday in which it sought to portray Gantz, the leader of the rival Blue and White party, as mentally unstable.
“Benny Gantz has lost it,” ran the message, referring to a recording broadcast a few days earlier in which Gantz speculated in a closed-door gathering that Netanyahu would be happy to see him dead and may have asked Russia to interfere in the elections.
“His appearances speak for themselves. Gantz is scared and weak,” Likud said. It called the former IDF chief “paranoid” and unfit to serve as prime minister.
As part of the campaign to show that Gantz was unstable, Likud also showed an edited clip from a recent interview in which Gantz stuttered several times, and another clip that repeatedly zooms in on his eyes with an accompanying horror movie soundtrack, apparently trying to convey that he has a crazed look.
The spots are part of a campaign by Likud that has been repeatedly criticized for mocking a war veteran reporter’s wounds, showing the graves of fallen soldiers as the background of an ad, and veering regularly to personal name-calling against Gantz and other challengers.
The campaign came under fire from Israel’s senior disability official.
“Over the past few days we’ve seen a worrying trend in the election campaign and in media discourse that will severely affect the equality of the disabled in Israel” after Election Day, disability equality commissioner Avrami Torem wrote in a letter to the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer.
Torem, who chairs the Commission for Equal Rights for People with Disabilities in the Justice Ministry, is Israel’s top state official overseeing implementation of equality policies and laws for the disabled.
“As part of the election campaign,” he wrote, “various parties are launching negative campaigns against their competitors and attacking them personally with terms and labels from the lexicon of disabilities.”
Zvi Fishel, head of the Israel Psychiatric Association, condemned the spots as “shameful.”
“I read the texts coming out of your camp and I’m horrified,” Fishel wrote in a Facebook post addressed to Netanyahu.
“Is it possible that the leader of our country, a public servant, who is meant to be an example to us all, uses terms like ‘insanity’ to humiliate a political rival, and to hurt his public image? Mr. Prime Minister, you’re confused! A psychiatric patient is sick like any another patient in Israel. He isn’t a target for mockery or ostracism.”
He added: “A mental illness is not an epithet, and not a warped way to humiliate another person.”
Likud’s ads alleging Gantz suffered from mental illness followed previous campaign spots by the ruling party, mentioned by Torem, that drew rebuke from across the political spectrum.
One spot run on the party’s Facebook livestream “Likud TV” outlet mocked the war wounds of a veteran Channel 12 political analyst, Amnon Abramovitch, known as a frequent critic of the prime minister.
Abramovitch’s face is covered by scar tissue from burns he sustained after his tank was hit by Egyptian fire during the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. An actor playing him in the Likud ad wore makeup approximating the scars and joked that he looked wonderful.
The clip was condemned by veterans’ organizations and taken off the air.
Another Likud ad that caused a firestorm showed a narrator warning that Gantz was a “leftist” whose election would see terrorists attacking Israelis. The narrator, right-wing activist Avishai Ivri, stood against the background of graves of soldiers who died in battle, at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu apologized for the use of the graves of dead soldiers in the spot, saying the ad was produced without his knowledge. Ivri was removed from the Likud campaign staff.
Blue and White has repeatedly blasted Likud’s negative campaign ads. On Wednesday, spokesman Yoaz Hendel, one of the party’s top candidates for Knesset, told Israel Radio, “There are people in Israel today who have no red lines…and are willing to do anything” to win the election.
Likud’s ads about Gantz’s purported mental illness followed leaks aired by Channel 13 on Sunday in which the Blue and White leader told a closed-door gathering that he believed Netanyahu had shown during the campaign that if he could order Gantz’s assassination, he would do so.
“If (Netanyahu) had a way that I would be harmed, that they would kill me, he would do it,” Gantz says, adding that the upcoming elections had made the prime minister desperate.
“Would regular Benjamin Netanyahu, who I know, want me harmed? The answer is no. Would Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of elections want me harmed? Unfortunately, I would have to say so,” said Gantz, who served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces under Netanyahu from 2011 to 2015.
This is not the first time that recordings have surfaced from Gantz’s meetings with supporters behind closed doors. Recently he was heard saying that he hadn’t ruled out Netanyahu as a possible coalition partner, contradicting his public statements.
The Times of Israel Community.