Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an embarrassing slip of the tongue in interviews he gave to Israeli television Sept. 24. Netanyahu was asked why he had decided to call the family of Elor Azaria, who shot and killed an incapacitated Palestinian assailant March 24 in Hebron, although the soldier is on trial for manslaughter over the incident. In his response, Netanyahu compared the call to any call he would make to a bereaved family that had lost a son in battle.
Netanyahu came under harsh criticism for this statement, but the first response released by his office, at 6:30 a.m. the next day, a Sunday, did not include an apology. Rather, it was a denial and an attack on the media. Then someone focused Netanyahu’s attention on a tweet sent a few hours earlier from New York by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak that read, “Anyone who compares Elor Azaria to Israel’s heroes and missing soldiers is a terrified and confused man, who has lost whatever was left of his good judgment, or, God forbid, has decided to try and ransack the Israel Defense Forces’ [IDF] values. This must not be allowed to happen. A sitting prime minister who does not take back this unrestrained nonsense will always bear the mark of indignity of someone who forgot what it means to be an IDF fighter.”
A short while later, a little after 8 a.m., Netanyahu released a new statement with a very different tone: “I’m sorry if my statements were misconceived. I absolutely did not mean to compare the suffering of bereaved families, the suffering that I know of firsthand, to the situation of other parents who are in distress. There was no comparison and there cannot be any such comparison.”
The people around Barak are convinced that Netanyahu “straightened up” only after he read the stinging tweet from his former IDF commander and decided to change tactics because of it. Instead of denying or absolving himself of responsibility, as Netanyahu is prone to do, he simply apologized. The relationship between Barak and Netanyahu is among the most complicated and intriguing ones in Israeli politics. Even when Barak was defense minister in Netanyahu’s government (2009-13), Netanyahu’s deep deference to Barak never dimmed.
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