The name of Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, has been associated in recent years with countless scandals. We don’t have room to enumerate them all here, but in order to get to know the personality in question, the following are some of the headlines for Yair — the son who is firing in every direction and drawing fire in return.
In September 2017, he shared a caricature with anti-Semitic symbols and motifs in order to attack former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and he received a warm embrace from the American neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. On the memorial day in November 2018 for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he shared the following post: “24,000 Israeli war casualties — one memorial day. Six million victims of the Holocaust — one memorial day. Rabin’s assassination — 10 memorial days.”
In January 2018, the News Corporation revealed recordings of conversations Yair held with his friends as they returned from a strip club. He spoke derisively toward women, including a young woman he had been in a relationship with, and even boasted that his prime minister father granted a favor to his friend’s father, the gas tycoon Koby Maimon, totaling 20,000 billion NIS ($5.5 billion). By the way, the trip to the strip club was in a Shin Bet vehicle and with its security.
His wild, arrogant and dissolute behavior, and his venomous disparagement of politicians and security personnel by cyberbullying would remain in the gossip columns if Yair didn’t have an active and even a central role in the election campaign conducted by his father. While neither Yair nor the prime minister’s close circles nor senior Likud officials have ever admitted that Yair has an active role in the inciteful campaign of the elder Netanyahu, this week we received proof of it. The right-wing organization Shurat Din, where Yair has worked as a new media coordinator for the past six months, let him go on an extended vacation until after the April 9 elections in light of the vitriolic remarks he posts on social networks on March 12. Haaretz quoted a source from the organization, who said that Yair requested to go on vacation because “he’s a significant partner in shaping the messages of the Likud’s campaign.’’ That is, the dagger is out of the bag. Yair isn’t acting as a rebellious son his parents can’t control but is a key part of the Likud’s negative, hate-filled campaign.
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