Congrats, Netanyahu. A New Low
The moral is this: If Benjamin Netanyahu can do something like this to someone like this, he can do anything to anyone.
Bradley Burston Jun 21, 2016 5:25 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.726306
(...) The story is this: Earlier in the week, the prime minister had cited as one of the achievements of his recent Moscow visit with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, persuading the Russian leader to return an Israeli tank captured by Syria in a disastrous battle of the 1982 Lebanon war.
The Prime Minister’s Office had indicated to the press that the tank was the one manned by three soldiers missing in the battle, 34 years nearly to the day of the Moscow trip.
Netanyahu himself suggested that the return of the tank might bring the bereaved families solace. “The families of the missing, Zacharia Baumel, Zvi Feldman and Yehuda Katz, have not had a physical vestige of their sons or a grave to visit for the past 34 years,” he said in a statement.
Only when Netanyahu returned from Russia did it emerge that this had been an unusually cynical public relations ploy, exploiting the feelings of the long-grieving families for the sake of a cheap photo opportunity.
“The prime minister phoned me and told me ’Here, your brother’s tank is arriving,” Katz’ sister Perhia Heiman told Israel’s Channel 10 on Friday.
When Heiman checked the chassis number of the tank, however, she discovered that it was not her brother’s at all.
“The tank belonged to the deputy battalion commander, who ran away - which is exactly the opposite of the missing men of the Sultan Yaakoub battle, who fought like lions - and who abandoned them in the field.”
“Why keep me waiting on burning coals, with the supposed ’news item’ that this is my brother’s tank?” she asked.
Asked if she was saying that Netanyahu knew that this was not the tank, she replied, “Yes. Yes, yes. The IDF has known for several weeks that this was not the same tank.”
Heiman noted that the prime minister knew the grief of losing a sibling. Netanyahu’s brother Yoni was killed during the 1976 Entebbe raid to rescue terror hostages in Uganda.
“I believe it’s time to bring an end to this cynicism on the part of a prime minister who is also a bereaved brother, to bully and give the run-around to the families of missing soldiers this way - there has to be a limit.”
Perhia Heiman has reached hers. Early next week, by the Hebrew calendar the 34th anniversary of the battle, she will be standing outside the Prime Minister’s Office, with a clear message for Netanyahu:
“Help me to stand beside the prime minister’s office,” she told viewers on Friday, “and call on him to resign.”
"He may have the legal or some other sort of authority to continue to serve as prime minister, but he no longer has the moral authority.
“There is no leader without a people. And we will not accept that kind of shoddy leadership.”
She asked people who wished to help her organize the demonstration to contact her at heimanp@bezeqint.net.
Asked why she thought Netanyahu had publicized the return of the tank, with the prime minister’s office quoted as saying it was her brother’s, she answered without hesitation.
“This is what he had an interest in presenting, perhaps in order to give it ’spin’ because that same day, the police reached the conclusion that there was evidence to bring his wife Sara Netanyahu to trial, in connection with (financial irregularities at) the prime minister’s residences.”
The story did not end there, however. Asked if Netanyahu knew that the tank was not Heiman’s brothers, the Prime Minister’s Office responded with a tortuous statement that began by insisting that Netanyahu honored the families, continued by indirectly accusing Heiman of lying about something she, in fact, did not say, and ended by saying, in effect, that we in the prime minister’s office never really, exactly, precisely, explicitly, said that this was the same tank.
A new low.
Now, after 34 years, Perhia Heiman has only begun her fight. She listened to the Prime Minister’s Office response with quiet composure.
“That’s his statement. But I have recordings of the conversations in my possession,” she said.
Next week. The Prime Minister’s Office. 3 Kaplan Street, Kiryat Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem.
The moral is this: If Benjamin Netanyahu can do something like this to someone like this, he can do anything to anyone.
