https://www.jns.org/OPINION/BENNETTS-BIG-TWITTER-BLUNDER/
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett chose a particularly inopportune moment to enrage disgruntled voters. Though a member of his staff was likely responsible for the extremely poor judgment call, Bennett is the one in whose name the move was made. Its subsequent reversal after an outcry, then, proved insufficient.
The incident in question involved the bereaved father of Shir Hajaj, 22, a female Israel Defense Forces lieutenant killed in a 2017 Palestinian truck-ramming attack. She was murdered along with three other innocent IDF soldiers enjoying an educational field trip in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood.
In a post on Sunday evening—mere hours after 25-year-old Eliyahu Kay, an immigrant to Israel from South Africa, was gunned down by a Hamas-linked terrorist on a rampage near the Western Wall in Jerusalem—Herzl Hajaj announced that Bennett had blocked him on Twitter.
Referring to him as the “prime minister of the terrorist [coalition] … who knew how to ask us to support him in the election,” Hajaj accused Bennett of “now being unable to handle my criticism of the formation of his government with the terrorist-supporting Ra’am Party. … Now he can embrace the terrorist-supporting [Ra’am leader Mansour] Abbas in peace, without criticism [and] without our reminding him of the truth.”
The stir caused by Hajaj’s tweet, which accompanied a screen shot of Bennett’s account blocking him, spurred the prime minister’s staff to engage in on-the-spot damage control. Less than an hour after it appeared, the prime minister unblocked Hajaj and issued an odd semblance of an apology.
Saying that blocking Hajaj had been done with “good intent,” the prime minister’s office claimed that “The moment his social-media team understood it, the block was lifted.” By “it,” the PMO seemed to mean the foolishness of the decision—taken by tech-savvy but otherwise pretty ignorant young people—to protect their boss by penalizing his critics.