Did radical leftist journalist Yigal Sarna of Yedioth Aharonoth utter a veiled threat against Jewish Home Chairman Naftali Bennett?
Sarna published a tweet aimed at nationalists in which he said: “When you have a Bennett Square, you can hold mass rallies there against the Left's incitement. But in Rabin Square? Scum.”
Sarna's tweet refers to the fact that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered next to the square in Tel Aviv, which was then named after him.
In response, Bennett wrote: “Yigal Sarna, from the Buji-Tzipi [Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni – ed.] camp: so now you are recommending that I be murdered? The nation of Israel will answer you with the letters טב in the ballot box.”
According to Kikar Hashabat, a short time later, Sarna removed the post and wrote bitterly: “Correction and clarification: after the death of Yitzhak Rabin from complications of pneumonia that followed an appearance on a very cold evening, the square's name was changed from Malchei Yisrael Square to Rabin Square.”
Another leftist journalist, Rino Tzror of Army Radio, attacked organizers of the rally who, he said, purposely used the square's old name – Malchei Yisrael – in advertising the rally.
“This is a tearing up and a debasement of public memory,” he said on his radio show. “According to the publicly accepted rules, leaders should not take part in this.”
By presenting the square under its former name, he said, “the nationalist camp objects to the sovereignty of Tel Aviv over its squares. And it also stresses, in its own way, the murder of the leader Yitzhak Rabin, the fault line between right and left, 20 years ago today, and is trying to sharpen the rift between the blocs in the election.”
Tzror added that the Right may be miscalculating. “The drift away from Netanyahu and Liberman is changing the power balance,” he opined, and the people who will vote for Kahlon, Lapid and Livni may decide the election in favor of the Left.