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Photo: Israel Bardugo
Netanyahu flooded wtih criticism after Paris visit.
Photo: Israel Bardugo

Lapid: Netanyahu represented 'pushy' Israelis in Paris

Yesh Atid chairman adds to criticism of Netanyahu's last minute trip to Paris, criticizing the prime minister for video showing him skipping a line to get to the bus.

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid joined the criticism that was flooding towards the Netanyahu camp after his visit in Paris and said on Monday that while it was good that Israel had representation in Paris, Netanyahu represented the "impolite" and "pushy" Israeli.

 

 

"The prime minister's behavior in Paris shows the world the impolite Israeli, the pushy Israeli, and it is unfortunate," said Lapid at a conference in Tel Aviv on Monday.

 

Netanyahu caught on video pushing his way to the front row of the march. (Photo: Reuters) (Photo: Reuters)
Netanyahu caught on video pushing his way to the front row of the march. (Photo: Reuters)

 

Lapid's comments came after a video posted on Facebook, the news footage mockingly set to the Looney Tunes cartoon music, showed Netanyahu maneuvering his way to the front of the rally with the help of several bodyguards, allowing him to be photographed arm-in-arm with other leaders, including French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

 

To add injury to insult, Netanyahu was also captured skipping to the head of the line for a bus in Paris in a video that also spread on the internet.

 

Netanyahu visits memorial at supermarket that was site of attack. (Photo: Haim Zach/GPO) (Photo: Haim Zach / GPO)
Netanyahu visits memorial at supermarket that was site of attack. (Photo: Haim Zach/GPO)

 

"A prime minister who pushes his way in line is a type of behavior that is not polite," said Lapid. "This is how Netanyahu acted with the Americans when he slowly started to destroy our relations with the US, and I do not want this to happen to us with Europe," said Lapid in an interview with journalist Niv Riskin.

 

Lapid added that he wanted to visit Paris as well but decided not to go because he saw that Israel had more than enough representation at the march with Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Enonomy Minister Naftali Bennett, and former Shas member Eli Yishai representing Israel in Paris.

 

Lapid slams Netanyahu. (Photo: Herzel Yosef)
Lapid slams Netanyahu. (Photo: Herzel Yosef)

 

Netanyahu managed to ruffle a few feathers while taking part in the "Charlie Hebdo" rally in Paris on Sunday, an event his office initially said he would not be attending for security reasons.

 

Perhaps most awkward was his invitation to French Jews - alarmed by the Paris attacks and the killing of four people at a kosher supermarket - to migrate to Israel if they wanted, leaving French Prime Minister Manuel Valls scrambling to reassure the community it was safe and an integral part of France.

 

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association, was particularly stern, saying Aliyah - the process of Jews migrating to Israel - was not the answer to everything, even if it was an important policy for the state of Israel.

 

"Anyone familiar with the European reality knows that a call to Aliyah is not the solution for anti-Semitic terror," he said.

 

Only a few French Jews move to Israel each year - last year 7,000 out of the 550,000-strong community. That number is expected to rise to more than 10,000 in 2015, in part because of last week's attacks.

 

Helping more of the Jewish diaspora migrate to Israel remains a central policy of the right-wing government, which faces elections in March. But many don't want to leave France and even those considering it worry about the difficulties of starting a new life in a foreign country.

 

"I live in France and I want to die in France," said Mauricette Abouchaya, a middle-aged Parisian woman cheering on Netanyahu as he visited the site of the kosher grocery attack.

 

"Israel has a very different culture and language," said a 38-year-old financial analyst who gave his name as Sami.

 

Netanyahu's "move to Israel" rhetoric was in fact no different to what he frequently says on the topic. But coming on the day of a three-million-person march designed to show the world standing as one with France, it came across as divisive.

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who was standing alongside Tusk, six feet (two meters) from Netanyahu, also arrived in Paris after it was confirmed that Netanyahu would make the trip to the French capital. The two broke off peace talks last April and tensions between them have risen since, with Netanyahu accusing Abbas of inciting violence against Israelis.

 

The irony is that neither Netanyahu nor Abbas initially planned to be in Paris.

 

Sources in Netanyahu's office said that in a phone call on Friday evening an adviser to Hollande had suggested it would be "complicated" and "uncomfortable" if the Israeli leader attended the Sunday march, largely because of security concerns.

 

As a result, the first word was that Netanyahu would not go. Around the same time, Abbas's office said he also would not be attending because of bad weather.

 

But then it emerged that Lieberman and Bennett, both leaders of far-right nationalist parties and both gearing up for the March 17 elections, were going of their own accord.

 

It is not clear when the situation changed, but by Saturday evening Netanyahu had decided he would attend, and shortly afterwards Abbas said he had been invited too. Asked in Paris on Monday about the back-and-forth, Netanyahu played it down.

 

"It was important I come here and therefore I did," he said, adding that security had been the initial hurdle. On Sunday evening, he spoke at the main synagogue in Paris, an event that Hollande pointedly left before Netanyahu began his speech.

 

While the images on Facebook and Twitter are likely to buoy Netanyahu domestically, despite some criticism of his gauche behavior, going to Paris served Abbas less well. He has been vilified on social media and in newspaper cartoons for going to the French capital rather than visiting Gaza, which he has not been to since before last summer's war with Israel.

 


פרסום ראשון: 01.12.15, 19:09
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