TV airs recording of top Gantz adviser assailing him as ‘danger’ to Israel
Israel Bachar says his boss ‘doesn’t have the courage to attack Iran’; Blue and White dismisses report as part of Likud-made ‘industry of lies’
With four days to go to the election, Channel 12 news published a recording Thursday of a top political adviser to Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz assailing his boss’s intelligence and competence.
In the recording, a man said to be Israel Bachar, one of Gantz’s top political advisers, is heard talking about Gantz with an unidentified acquaintance. The network said the recording was made several days ago.
Bachar is heard conveying the opinion of Blue and White MK Omer Yankelevich.
“She [Yankelevich] says he [Gantz] is stupid and a complete nobody and she says, ‘he can’t be prime minister,’” Bachar said.
When the acquaintance suggests Gantz would work to stop “some people abroad who might try to attack Iran,” Bachar says, “I know that.”
“What do you know?” the acquaintance asks.
“That he [Gantz] doesn’t have the courage to attack Iran,” Bachar says.
“Because that’s [the character of] the man?”
“Because that’s the man,” Bachar agrees, and says the former army chief’s refusal to permit a strike on Iran was “a danger to the people of Israel.”
Channel 12 reported that Bachar has been privately disparaging Gantz for some time, even as he worked as a top adviser on Blue and White’s campaign.
Blue and White dismissed the recording as “lies” engineered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
“It’s a shame that this industry of lies produced by Likud continues to operate. If the defendant Netanyahu gets just one more seat [in the March 2 race] then he stays in power,” the party said in a statement.
It added: “The choice [on election day] is between Blue and White and this [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan.”
Netanyahu himself shared the Channel 12 report on social media with the comment, “Even the people closest to Gantz know that he can’t be prime minister and that he is a danger to Israel’s security.”
On Wednesday, in a televised press statement, Gantz lashed out at Netanyahu for running a campaign of “lies and mud,” and contrasted Netanyahu’s current campaign with his invitation to Gantz in late 2018 to serve as his defense minister.
The Times of Israel Community.