A spokesperson for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu denied reports that his children get chauffeured on weekends to social events, revealing that his youngest son, Avner, observes the Shabbat.
The denial came following a report earlier this week by the news site The Marker on the publication of a personnel ad by the Prime Minister’s Office seeking students willing to work on weekends as chauffeurs. The Marker quoted unnamed sources as saying the ad was published after state employees from the state’s chauffeur pool complained about having to drive Yair and Avner Netanyahu around.
The news came amid a criminal probe into several accusations of corruption made against Netanyahu, including with regard to recordings of his conversations with Arnon Mozes, the publisher and owner of the Yediot Aharonot daily.
On Friday, Netanyahu was questioned for the third time by police on that affair, and on suspicions that he received gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from friends.
On Wednesday, he said during an address at the Knesset that the launching of the criminal probes were not aimed at serving justice but at replacing him as prime minister.
“This is an unprecedented campaign of persecution, hypocrisy and manipulation,” Netanyahu said. “The objective is to achieve a transition of power by applying media pressure on the attorney general so that he may indict at whatever cost. It is a good thing the air conditioner is working, because a good many people here would have the butter on their heads melting otherwise (a reference to a Yiddish saying that someone who is guilty has butter on his head and must prevent its melting - meaning that many of the MKs present had also met with newspaper owners about their own coverage.”
Following the ad, Ometz, a nonprofit watchdog on corruption, on Thursday wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office to protest the behavior described in The Marker.
“We fail to understand how the Prime Minister’s Office authorized, and how you authorized such an outrageous and scandalous request to fund with state money the private affairs of the prime minister’s family,” Ometz wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office legal advisor. Haredi media meanwhile criticized the potential employment of Jewish chauffeurs to operate a vehicle on Shabbat, when doing so is forbidden by Jewish Orthodox law except in cases of extreme urgency with life-and-death implications.
All this, of course, without checking the facts. A spokesperson for the Netanyahu family soon said that neither the prime minister nor his children determine the security arrangements around their transportation needs.
The spokesperson declined to specify what those needs are citing security issues, but added: “The report is false, also because Avner Netanyahu observes the Shabbat, and does not enter a car on the Shabbat.”
Avner is not the only one in the family to keep Shabbat; his older half-sister, Noa became religiously observant, and now lives in the Meah Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem.