Israeli Press
Haaretz declares Netanyahu unfit after his ex-aide's loyalty-oath testimony
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The liberal daily Haaretz ruled in its Sunday editorial that Benjamin Netanyahu is unfit to head a government, drawing the verdict from the televised testimony of Yoav Horowitz, who ran the Prime Minister's Office in 2018 and 2019.
Horowitz's interviews, which this paper covered on Saturday, described demands that bureau and household staff sign personal loyalty pledges to the Netanyahu family. "The demand for personal loyalty hovered there all the time, as a kind of obsession," the editorial quotes him saying.
Since Netanyahu's indictment, in Horowitz's account, every political, security, economic or party decision has passed "through the prism of the personal". The editors write that the years since only sharpened the pattern — down to captive deals undermined by survival calculations.
Two decisions the editorial attributes to the family's intervention reach directly into Palestinian lives. Horowitz testified that Sara and Yair Netanyahu influenced the placing of metal detectors at the gates of al-Aqsa in 2017 — the move that set off weeks of mass protest in Jerusalem — and the cancellation of an agreed refugee arrangement with the United Nations, undone after a family phone call.
A prime minister whose every decision passes through a personal prism, the editorial concludes, and who lets unelected family members steer state decisions, cannot remain in office; the public should end this at the coming election.
Horowitz now heads the team planning the first hundred days of a Gadi Eisenkot government.
