Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Netanyahu’s Son Posts Anti-Semitic Facebook Image

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s 26-year-old son, continues to court controversy with his social media activity.

The young Netanyahu is widely seen in Israel as being groomed by his parents as a future political leader and the Facebook posts have attracted particular public interest.

On Saturday, he posted on Facebook a cartoon mocking some of his father’s critics using what the Anti-Defamation League described as anti-Semitic imagery.

It included a depiction of U.S. billionaire and left-wing philanthropist George Soros at the top of a food chain, dangling the world in front of both a reptile and former prime minister Ehud Barak, a frequent critic of Netanyahu.

The Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League denounced the cartoon on Twitter, writing: “The caricature posted by Yair Netanyahu includes explicit anti-Semitic elements. One cannot belittle the danger inherent in an anti-Semitic discourse.”

In further Facebook posts following criticism for posting the cartoon, Yair Netanyahu, who is a university student, condemned the Israeli left for being two-faced in trying to silence him.

A family spokesman said Yair Netanyahu would not be making any other comment. The prime minister refused to answer questions from reporters about the post on Sunday morning at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting.

Last month, the son made another headline-grabbing post after a protester was killed during a white nationalist rally in the U.S. state of Virginia. It appeared to suggest that hard-left organizations now pose more of a danger than neo-Nazi groups, which he wrote are a dying breed.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.