In a battling speech to some 3,000 supporters who gathered in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the left and the media of using ever-widening corruption investigations against him and his family to try to oust him from power in what he called “a coup against the government.”
“They don’t want to just take me down, they want to take us all down,” he told the Likud party crowd. “They know that they can’t beat us at the ballot boxes, so they are trying to circumvent democracy and topple us in other ways.”
“But we keep winning in the ballots because we’ve brought Israel to the best place it has ever been in Israel’s history,” he said.
Netanyahu used the speech, carefully timed so that it was carried live on primetime TV news, to argue that preserving him and the “national camp” in power was crucial to Israel’s well-being. He said that when Likud PM Yitzhak Shamir was ousted in 1992, what followed were the “disastrous” Oslo accords and a wave of terrorism, and that when he himself lost power in 1999, the second intifada followed. In both cases, he claimed, the media had ousted a right-wing leadership by using false accusations. READ MORE
