Netanyahu, Shas leader chide Likud aide Eshel for saying base ‘united by hate’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebuked a top aide for saying that part of Likud’s voter base was driven by hate, as the comments drew condemnation from across the political spectrum.

Netanyahu said in a statement late Saturday that he called top Likud negotiator Natan Eshel and told him that his comments are “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

In a recording aired on Saturday, Eshel was heard saying that negative campaigning works well with “non-Ashkenazi” voters and that “hate is what unites” the right-wing camp led by the Likud party.

“He apologized immediately. The Likud is home to all parts of the Israeli public and that’s the way it will always be,” Netanyahu says in a statement sent to the press.

In the leaked recording, Eshel could be heard discussing the party’s campaign strategy with an unnamed person whom he is trying to recruit as a political adviser, according to Channel 12 news, which aired the tape. In the tape, Eshel says that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s decision to indict Netanyahu in three corruption cases actually helped the premier in his campaign. “He went up by 20 percent,” Eshel recalls, though it was unclear what numbers he was referring to.

“If you haven’t stolen, what exactly have you come [into politics] for? We’ve checked this. And to my shock, they [the public] do not understand [this notion] of going into politics to do what’s good for the nation. You go into politics in order to steal and you need to be a man,” Eshel claims in the recording.

“Now, in this public, I’ll call it… non-Ashkenazi…What gets them worked up? Why do they hate the press?…They hate everything and we’ve succeeded in whipping up that hatred. Hatred is what unites our camp,” Eshel says plainly.

The comments appeared to refer to the Likud base of voters from Mizrahi communities, often in the periphery, who have long supported the party.

Aryeh Deri, the head of the Shas party mainly supported by religious Mizrahi Jews, called Eshel’s comments “grave and outrageous,” in a statement to the press.

But he also praised Netanyahu for rebuking Eshel. “We need to fight any show of racism without compromise and with determination.”

The Shas party is one of two ultra-Orthodox parties that formed a negotiating bloc with Netanyahu’s Likud after September elections, though its unclear if the grouping will remain in place after Monday’s vote. Deri in the past has campaigned on being a senior partner to Netanyahu, and has signaled a commitment to stick with the Likud leader.

The Blue and White party, which is battling Likud for the reins of the government on Monday, said the Eshel recording shows what the Netanyahu aide “really thinks of Likud voters.”

“It is Netanyahu’s spirit that is poisoning Israel. It will be over in two days. Bibi, go home!,” the centrist party said in a statement.

The left-wing Labor-Gesher-Meretz party said that Eshel proved “what we all knew: Netanyahu is a divisive and inciting person, whose whole campaign is based on racism, hatred of the other, sectoralism and discrimination.”

Israelis on Monday will go to the polls for the third vote in under a year, after two previous attempts failed to give either Likud or Blue and White enough support to form a governing coalition. Both parties are again polling neck and neck.

Asked to comment on the leaked recording, Eshel said he would not respond to “lies,” though it was unclear what exactly he was disputing.

The Likud party appeared to accept that the recording was genuine, but asserted in a statement that “it is impossible to compare Nathan Eshel’s erroneous private opinion when he has no role in the Likud campaign to the shocking testimony of Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz’s senior adviser, Israel Bachar, who says Gantz is a danger to Israel and does not deserve to be prime minister.”

Bachar, in a recording leaked to Channel 12 on Thursday, could be heard saying that Gantz does not have the courage to attack Iran and could pose a danger to Israel’s security.

Eshel, a former Netanyahu chief of staff who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, continues to work with the premier, leading the previous two coalition negotiations over the past year.

Last week, Netanyahu was forced to apologize to a prominent religious-Zionist rabbi Chaim Druckman after Eshel was recorded mocking him and the Yamina party that views him as a religious leader.

In the recording, Eshel appears to mock Druckman with the dismissive Yiddish prefix “sh,” calling him “Druckman and Shmuckman.”

Eshel later explained in a statement that he had spoken in “slang” and meant nothing by the comment.