BICOM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the Likud election campaign last night, saying the choice is “either a strong right-wing government under my leadership or a weak left-wing government”.

At the start of the evening Prime Minister Netanyahu shook hands with long-time rival Gideon Saar and said the time had come to join hands and to work together for a Likud victory.

The Prime Minister attacked the media for its alleged bias against him, saying: “Right-wing voters, for four years you have sat at home and heard, evening after evening, the propaganda broadcasts against us on television. Channels 11, 12, 13, are all the same thing, brainwashing. How slanted they are. How distorted.”

Slamming rivals Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, co-leaders of the Blue and White Party, Netanyahu said: “Let them have ten Chiefs of Staff, when your policy is mistaken, it makes no difference. And their policy is fundamentally mistaken. Lapid and Gantz, they want to run the country? Do you know what we will get? A blind alternating premiership, an inexperienced alternating premiership, a weak alternating premiership, an alternating left wing. You vote for Gantz and you get Lapid.”

Listing his foreign policy successes, Netanyahu cited several countries that he has recently visited, but mistakenly said Afghanistan instead of Azerbaijan.

Earlier in the day Likud released a campaign film which showed Gantz participating in a ceremony at Kibbutz Kfar Aza in June 2015 for Israeli and Palestinian victims after Operation Protective Edge. Netanyahu had said on Sunday that Gantz “attended a memorial ceremony for a thousand Hamas terrorists who were killed in Protective Edge”.

Responding to the speech, the Blue and White party said that Netanyahu was “spreading lies and incitement” in order to “divert the conversation from the investigation and the indictment he now faces. Israel is desperately waiting for moral and responsible leadership that will care about the everyday life of its citizens, and not with speeches riddled with hate. Bibi, thank you, we will take it from here. It’s time we shift our focus back to the people, not the Prime Minister.”

Earlier in the day, Gantz and Lapid visited the Golan Heights where they vowed “never to withdraw” and said they will work to promote American, EU and UN recognition of Israel’s sovereignty there.