“I could stand here till tomorrow morning, your honor, and tell you what the news media has done to me,” Ms. Netanyahu told a judge last year in court during another defamation case. “But let’s save the time,” she said.
What to Know About Israel’s New Government
“I think that the media hides all the wonderful things that I do,” she added.
But over the past year, a number of people once close to Mr. Netanyahu have lifted a veil on some of the family’s inner dealings, speaking openly on television and in court, under oath, about episodes that have raised alarms.
Ms. Netanyahu has garnered many sensational headlines over the years after getting in trouble over household expenses and getting sued by domestic staff for abusive behavior. Now the perceived growing influence of Yair Netanyahu over his father and his strident voice on radio and social media are getting increased attention.
In November, Yair Netanyahu joined a right-wing Twitter campaign berating the army’s top brass for suspending two soldiers from operational activity for physically and verbally abusing left-wing Israeli activists in the occupied West Bank.
In October, within hours of a television report saying that Israel and Lebanon were near an agreement to demarcate their maritime economic border, he tweeted or retweeted almost 80 posts slamming the deal, reached by the last government, as a shameful surrender to Lebanon — a message that his father, as the opposition leader, quickly incorporated into his campaign.
In June, Yair Netanyahu wrote a column for ICE, an Israeli online publication, detailing the various rulers and conquests of the Holy Land, starting from biblical times, concluding that the Jews were the sole rightful owners. His father made a similar case in his autobiography, “Bibi: My Story,” that was published this fall, and the new government’s guidelines began with a declaration of the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.”
Sumber: www.nytimes.com
