‘Wonder Woman’ takes on Netanyahu over rights

occupied jerusalem — Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot has come to the rescue of a fellow Israeli celebrity in a spat with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Gadot, who typically shies away from politics, is rallying behind Rotem Sela, one of Israel’s top models and TV hosts, who drew fire from Netanyahu for criticising his fearmongering election campaign against the country’s Arab minority.

Sela’s rebuke of Netanyahu, and her call for equality for all Israeli citizens in an Instagram post, prompted the prime minister to take to social media himself and lecture her that “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and of it alone.”

Gadot responded late on Sunday with her own supportive post for Sela to her more than 28 million followers on Instagram: “Love thy neighbour as yourself. This isn’t an issue of right or left. Jew or Arab. Secular or religious. It’s an issue of dialogue,” Gadot wrote. “Rotem, my sister, you’re an inspiration to us all.”

Netanyahu, who is in a tight race for re-election, has tried to rally his religious and nationalist base with charged accusations that his challengers will form a coalition government with Arab political parties. The strategy has drawn charges of incitement from Arab leaders and other political opponents. Arab parties have never sat in a governing coalition.

Over the weekend, Culture Minister Miri Regev, a Netanyahu surrogate in the ruling Likud Party, repeated his mantra in a television interview. Sela, best known in Israel for hosting a pair of popular reality shows, was watching at home and responded angrily.

“What’s the problem with the Arabs? Good heavens, there are also Arab citizens in this country,” she wrote to her hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. “When the hell will somebody in the government tell the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people are born equal?”

Netanyahu quickly responded by correcting Sela that his government had passed a law enshrining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. He followed up the next day with another shot at the beginning of his weekly Cabinet meeting. “I would like to clarify a point that, apparently, is not clear to slightly confused people in the Israeli public,” he said. Israel “is the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people,” he said. —

Love thy neighbour as yourself. This isn’t an issue of right or left. Jew or Arab. Secular or religious. It’s an issue of dialogue.

Gal Gadot, Wonder woman star