Naftali Bennett apologizes to his parents: “Sorry, Dad and Mom.” This is how Naftali Bennett opened the post he uploaded to Facebook in which he apologizes to his parents for what they had to suffer because of him. In the post, Bennett recounts the lies he said were hurled at him and his parents and explains why he is suing for libel: “Millions of Israelis believed the lies”
Bennett’s full post:
They questioned my father’s Jewishness and presented my mother as a woman who was born a gentile
“In the past year and a half, the poison machine has been running a series of vile and false campaigns against me, my family and friends,” Bennett writes, “as if I took 50 million NIS of state money to renovate and improve my private home and into my bank account, as if I had given the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas 53 billion NIS, As if you found out and I’m getting a divorce and more and more. All of this is a complete lie,” Bennett writes.
The Bennett family has been through a lot. Photography: Haim Tzach
Bennett attacks the campaign that was conducted against him and says that “one of the uglier campaigns was to paint me as a non-Jew. Yes, I am Naftali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel at the time, supposedly I am not Jewish.” Bennett continues: “How did they do this? They cast doubt on the Jewishness of my father, the late James Jacob Bennett, and presented my mother Myrna-Leah as a woman who was allegedly born a gentile, and converted improperly. Their goal was to connect this to the big story that I am handing the country over to Hamas and our big enemies.”
We must make an effort to guard our tongue, our keyboard
Bennett recounts a conversation he had at that time with his mother: “At that time, my good mother called me in distress and told me that more and more people, including her friends, were approaching her with doubts about her Jewishness.” “I despised the campaign because I thought it was so far-fetched and who would believe it,” Bennett writes and adds: “I was also too busy managing the affairs of the state and told my mother to ignore it.”
Bennett concludes and writes: “It pains me to think about the damage to the name of my late father who flew specifically to Israel to fight in the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War. And mother, the kindest woman, a Zionist, a Jew, who taught us to do kindness and love the land – sorry mother. I had to act immediately.” Bennett ends the letter and writes: “All of us together, on the right and on the left, must make an effort to keep our tongues, on our keyboards. We have no other country.”