Netanyahu accuses left-wing, media of trying to oust him

Netanyahu, addressing a solidarity rally, tells his supporters the investigations into his alleged corruption are an effort by the left-wing and the media to topple his right-wing government.

It’s “an obsessive witch-hunt against me and my family” designed to achieve a political “coup” and force the “national camp” out of power.

“They don’t want to just take me down, they want to take us all down,” he says at a rally in Tel Aviv. “They know that they can’t beat us at the ballots, so they are trying to circumvent democracy and topple us in other ways.”

“But we keep winning in the ballots because we’ve brought Israel to the best place it has ever been in Israel’s history.”

“We know that the left and the media — and we know that it’s the same thing — is on an unprecedented hunt against me and my family to bring down the government. They are putting unrelenting pressure of the legal system in order for them to present an indictment without any proof.”

“The fake news is warning us that if we don’t withdraw from our historical homeland we will be weak and defeated,” he says.

“This is not the first time that the media has brought these fake accusations against the right,” he says. “They brought down [Yitzhak] Shamir in 1992 and brought us Oslo and bus bombings and dead people in restaurants,” he adds.

And in 1999, he says, he himself was ousted when Ehud Barak promised a new dawn. But that “dawn” brought the second intifada and more than 1,000 Israeli deaths, he says.

“Yesterday there was an article [in Haaretz] and I quote: ‘The Palestinians hope the investigations will bring down the Prime Minister.’ It’s no surprise that the media and the Palestinians want to bring me down — they both want us to pull out to the 1967 lines,” Netanyahu says.

The crowd responds with boos and chants of “down with the media.”

— Raoul Wootliff