Netanyahu’s wife on the attack: blames protesters for sexual harassment

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, filed Aug. 11 an official police complaint alleging threats to her life and sexual harassment. This was by no means a routine occurrence; in fact, no wife of an Israeli premier has ever been known to make such a complaint to the police.

For some two hours, Netanyahu presented the police investigator dispatched to the prime minister’s official residence with a litany of the threats and harassment to which she had been subjected. One of the key pieces of proof she cited was an obscene tweet by a man who described how he planned to rape her. She also presented the investigator with photos of the ongoing demonstrations taking place outside the official residence in Jerusalem in recent weeks, at which several protesters held aloft inflated balloons in the shape of penises. The balloons were covered with lewd comments such as “Bibi [Netanyahu] is impotent” and “Come, Sara’leh, let’s get out of here,” echoing a remark that has become a cult classic that Netanyahu made to his wife in 1997 after complaining to reporters about constant attacks on his family. Yet another balloon addressed the couple’s son Yair, saying “Yair is a dick.”

On the same day, the prime minister himself sent a harsh, unprecedented letter to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, accusing him of repeatedly ignoring the threats against himself and his family to the extent that he was declaring “open season” on them. Referring to the alleged rape threat against Sara Netanyahu, he wrote, “Last week, protesters outside the prime minister’s residence waved about inflated male organs on which they wrote invective of a sexual nature directed at my wife, my son Yair and myself. And as if that were not enough, you did not deem fit to order an immediate investigation into the abominable tweet threatening specifically to rape my wife, not obliquely, not vaguely, but graphically threatening a brutal, shocking rape.” Mandelblit, by the way, deflected the accusations, responding with a detailed list of all the threat investigations police had undertaken.

The couple appears to have decided to launch a combined attack. Many pundits regard this as clear indication of Netanyahu’s preparations for imminent elections by presenting himself and his wife as victims of relentless persecution in order to mobilize his supporters. The explanation sounds logical and is in keeping with political reality and with Netanyahu’s campaign style. The writing is on the wall. The prime minister is gearing up for elections.