Netanyahu son under fire over anti-Semitic cartoon
JERUSALEM — Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, removed an anti-Semitic meme from his Facebook page Sunday after an outcry from Israeli politicians and Jewish community leaders in the United States.
The image, posted by Netanyahu on Friday, appeared to be a local take on a classic anti-Semitic cartoon suggesting that Jews control the United States. It has appeared widely on extreme right websites.
In this instance, it depicted his father’s perceived foes: American Jewish billionaire philanthropist and investor George Soros, outspoken former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, activist Eldad Yaniv and Meni Naftali, a former housekeeper for the Netanyahus who successfully sued them for mistreatment.
Netanyahu, who goes by the name “Yair Hun” on Facebook, had captioned the meme “the food chain.”
Over the weekend, Netanyahu’s actions drew praise from neo-Nazi groups in the United States, as well as from Holocaust denier David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Yair Netanyahu is a total bro,” Andrew Anglin wrote in the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer. “Next he’s going to call for gassings.”
Duke tweeted about it: “Welcome to the club, Yair — absolutely amazing, wow, just wow.”
But many in Israel and the U.S. condemned it, expressing shock that the prime minister’s son would share such an image.
The Israeli office of the Anti-Defamation League tweeted in Hebrew that “the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu blatantly contains anti-Semitic elements.”
Former prime minister Barak suggested the younger Netanyahu see a psychiatrist.
“Is this what the kid hears at home?” he wrote on Twitter. “Is it genetics, or a spontaneous mental illness? It doesn’t matter. In any case, we should fund his psychiatrist instead of security guards and a driver.”
Netanyahu responded to an article about his post in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, calling the publication anti-Semitic.
“It’s a particularly sad day for Israel when a caricature endorsed by the head of the KKK emerges from the home of the prime minister of the Jewish state,” Labor leader Avi Gabbay wrote on Twitter.
Yaniv and Naftali have been leading protests against the prime minister over what they see as a failure to issue indictments in at least two cases of alleged corruption.
“This post was not put up by mistake, this is in keeping with the views of his father,” Yaniv said. “He wants to set Israeli society on fire, pitching people against each other, so he can hide the suspicions that are against him.