Israel’s ruling Likud Party on Monday denounced former premier Ehud Barak for posting to social media a video that compares Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“Must watch! Is Netanyahu mentally unfit to run a country? Ichak Adizes, a leading international consultant on leadership issues, has a shocking opinion!” Barak wrote in a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
Adizes’s video also likened Netanyahu to former U.S. President Donald Trump and Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević, who in the 1990s became known as the “Butcher of the Balkans.”
צפיית חובה! האם נתניהו בלתי כשיר מנטלית לנהל מדינה? יצחק אדיג׳ס, יועץ בינלאומי מוביל בנושאי מנהיגות בחוות דעת מטלטלת! https://t.co/CTqv3FavIB
— אהוד ברק (@barak_ehud) August 27, 2023
“Ehud ‘Hot Neck’ Barak, partner of the pedophile Epstein, has finally gone off the rails,” the Likud Party said in response, in reference to a 2016 photo of Barak entering the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s New York residence wearing a neck warner.
“After saying that he will lead anti-government protests until there are ‘bodies floating in the Yarkon [River in Tel Aviv]’ and he’s called back to take the reins of power, Barak continues to incite the assassination of a sitting Israeli prime minister and compares him to Hitler,” added the party.
The statement concluded: “After dozens of complaints against instigators like him, where are the law enforcement agencies summoning him for investigation?”
Late last month, Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev sent a letter to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara calling for an investigation to be opened against Barak for allegedly inciting a coup d’état.
Regev cited a video clip circulating on social media that “shows without any shadow of a doubt that beginning in March 2020, former officials began concocting a plan for a coup d’état and civil disobedience, with detailed and careful planning.”
Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel-Atbaryan described in a July 21 X post what she claimed was Barak’s plan to bring down the government, describing an interview with Barak from 2020 to Forum 555, a group of retired Israel Air Force pilots and navigators.
The plan, she said, included inflaming the civilian population, creating a false representation of a danger to democracy and bankrolling protests, including purchasing flags.
Asked during the 2020 interview about a possible reprise of the “success of 1999,” when he was elected prime minister, Barak said, “A friend of mine, a historian, once told me, ‘Ehud, they will call you when bodies are floating in the Yarkon River.’
“I wish to stress: It is not the bodies of Palestinians from the territories illegally residing [in Israel] that will be floating, and not those of Israeli Arabs. The floating bodies will be of Jews that were killed by Jews,” explained Barak.