PM raps rightist group: Don’t call political opponents ‘traitors’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he opposes calling his political opponents “traitors,” even as he took a swipe at the left-wing Breaking the Silence organization for “slandering” Israel.

The prime minister was responding to a campaign by the rightist group Im Tirzu to label left-wing artists and other cultural figures as “foreign agent moles.”

“[I] oppose the use of the word ‘traitor’ to describe those who disagree with me,” Netanyahu said. “We are a democracy and there are a multitude of opinions.”

But Netanyahu took the opportunity to bash the left-wing organization Breaking the Silence, which collects reports, usually anonymously, about alleged abuses of Palestinians by soldiers in the West Bank. The left-wing NGO “slanders Israel abroad,” he charged.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon also denounced the “obnoxious and dangerous” Im Tirtzu campaign.

“I will argue with anyone who has a deep political dispute with me, and try to convince them and explain to them why I believe they are wrong,” Ya’alon said. “At the same time I would fight for their right to express their views freely, without any fear. The demonization of people who have different opinions as traitors is obnoxious and dangerous to me, and whoever published this instigating campaign does not represent the moderate right, and certainly not the Likud Party and its values.”

“Embarrassing, unnecessary, and degrading” is how Jewish Home part leader Naftali Bennett described controversy-courting Im Tirtzu’s new campaign.

The campaign, launched on Wednesday and titled “Moles in Culture,” features a list of artists that includes a number of well-known Israeli authors, actors and musicians — writers Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, actress Gila Almagor, and singers Rona Keinan and Chava Alberstein are featured — accusing them of being “moles” who support left-wing groups that receive some of their funding from foreign governments.

The Im Tirtzu campaign extends a drive by the group in late 2015 to accuse leading figures in Israel’s human rights organizations of being “moles” operated by foreign countries.

While Im Tirtzu’s director, Matan Peleg, maintained in interviews Thursday that the campaign was a merely a consciousness-raising effort, artists and lawmakers hit back at the group, calling it “fascist” and its campaign inciting and slanderous.

The campaign was condemned by several right-wing lawmakers earlier on Thursday, including Likud MK Benny Begin who said it was “fascist,” as well as “ugly” and “dangerous.”