From the Liveblog of
Monday, November 25, 2024
Lapid rips Netanyahu over report that his top aides ran PR campaign for Qatar
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Addressing a report that senior aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were behind a public relations campaign to boost Qatar’s global image before Doha hosted the 2022 soccer World Cup, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid states that in any other country such behavior would have led to the fall of the government.
Speaking with reporters ahead of his Yesh Atid party’s weekly faction meeting at the Knesset, Lapid declares it’s impossible to remain “indifferent” to the fact that within the Prime Minister’s Office “the people closest to him received money from Qatar to run a public relations campaign for a country that stands behind Hamas.”
According to the Haaretz daily, Jonatan Urich and Yisrael Einhorn, who at the time worked in their Perception PR company, partnered with another Israeli firm to create a campaign on behalf of Qatar that marketed the Gulf country as a bedrock of peace and stability.
At the time, Netanyahu was head of the opposition, but the government at the time, headed by Lapid and Naftali Bennett, was maintaining his policy of courting Qatar to send tens of millions of dollars each month to Gaza’s Hamas terrorist rulers in order to prevent the enclave’s economic collapse.
Urich and Perception denied the Haaretz report, calling it “fake news.”
“The most senior Hamas figures can be allowed to live in Qatar, to do business in Qatar” while Urich and Einhorn “profit from Qatar and explain to the world that the Qataris are actually good people,” charges Lapid.
Lapid says that if somebody close to him had acted this way, members of Netanyahu’s coalition “would be standing here screaming that this proves definitively that we normalized Hamas and did not understand what it was planning and what disaster it would bring upon us.” He also demands to know if Netanyahu was aware of Urich and Einhorn’s activities.
