Gloves are off in Israeli election

Israel’s national election is becoming particularly vicious and personal as campaigning enters its final week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AP

Israel’s national election is becoming particularly vicious and personal as campaigning enters its final week, highlighting how the battle for the prime ministership remains closely contested.

With a small advantage in polls showing he can build a ­majority coalition after next Tuesday’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has launched an offensive against Benny Gantz, a former general whose centrist coalition poses a stiff challenge.

In the past week, Mr Netanyahu has accused his opponent of being mentally unfit to be defence minister, let alone prime minister. The Prime Minister’s Likud party has said Mr Gantz has “lost it”, running a series of ads that use gaffes by the first-time politician to create a picture of a man unfit for office.

One ad features Mr Gantz repeating the words “totally stable” over and over, as the frame zooms in on his bulging eyes while scratchy, high-pitched string music from Psycho plays.

The attacks mark a reversal in Mr Netanyahu’s tone about Mr Gantz, who served the Prime Minister as chief of staff of the ­Israeli military in 2011 and was once a key security ally.

Mr Gantz emerged as Mr Netanyahu’s toughest challenger after the Prime Minister called for a new election in ­December, cobbling together a coalition called Blue and White of former military commanders and centre-left factions. Polls show that Blue and White could win more seats than Likud but that the Prime Minister’s right-wing allies would gain enough to give him a majority.

Mr Gantz has promised to run an above-board race but has taken a sharper tone in recent days. On Sunday, he said Mr Netanyahu’s election rhetoric “could cause a civil war”, and he has said his rhetoric helped create the atmosphere that led to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995.

He has pounded Mr Netanyahu over bribery and fraud charges recommended by the country’s top prosecutor. And he has amplified new allegations in media reports that Mr Netan­yahu inappropriately benefited from Israel’s purchase of submarines and naval vessels, though the Prime Minister faces no charges in that case.

On Monday, Mr Gantz ­accused Mr Netanyahu of running a “campaign of mind terrorism” after a political watchdog group, with the help of a liberal-leaning organisation, accused Likud of unleashing an army of social media accounts, some fake, to spread lies about his challengers.

Mr Netanyahu responded ­defiantly, saying the accounts weren’t fakes but average voters expressing their opinions. He has denied the bribery and fraud charges.

As for the submarine scandal, he accused Mr Gantz of spreading a “blood libel” against him, an allegation that recalls how false rumours against Jews were used to justify European pogroms for centuries.

“Everything is just personal, everything is being ramped up to the max,” said Anshel Pfeffer, an Israeli journalist who wrote a ­biography of Mr Netanyahu. “And now because Netanyahu is under a bigger threat because of the corruption probes and because Gantz is a tougher challenger, it’s much more visceral.”

Mr Netanyahu says it is Mr Gantz who is running the negative campaign. The Prime Minister’s supporters seem unfazed by the corruption probes or the increasingly dark tone of the race.

While a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that almost 50 per cent of Jewish Israelis don’t believe Mr Netanyahu when he says he didn’t benefit from the submarine deal, the same survey found a right-wing government led by Mr Netan­yahu is the preference of 39 per cent of Jewish Israeli voters.

The Wall Street Journal