by David Frattini
The first lady got her hair done in Tel Aviv amid protests against judicial reform. A selfie with an admirer sparked the revolt: she was escorted home by the secret services
from our correspondent
JERUSALEM – The more than forty thousand euros a year she has to spend on clothes, makeup artists and hairdressers (offered by taxpayers for the representative aspect and shared with her husband, the prime minister) cost Sara Netanyahu a few hours of panic and public contempt yesterday afternoon.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s wife has decided to show up for her hair in the wrong city at the wrong time. Since the morning, as the organizers promised on the Day of Disorder, Tel Aviv has been rocked by demonstrations blocking traffic and access to public offices. At sunset the police attack the demonstrators, throwing deafening grenades, the processions turn into clashes, the arrested are forty-two. At sunset, a customer of the same salon in the elegant north of the metropolis takes a selfie with Sara, posts it and actually indicates the position of the next target to the collective anger.
Hundreds of protesters march towards the barbershop’s windows, besieging it, shouting shame, shame at what they believe to be a Marie Antoinette, indifferent to the average Israeli’s difficulties between rising inflation and a falling economy because – accuses the opposition – the plan dismantling of the judiciary carried out by the wife. He appeals to political opponent Yair Lapid to remember the shameful encirclement and orders Secret Service guards, aided by mounted police, to evacuate Sara home in Jerusalem. From there, Bibi – as she has nicknames – posts a selfie in which she comforts her, accompanied by the words: Dear lady, I’m glad you’re here healthy and sound. This anarchy must end, it could cost lives.
From the personal to the political, the far-right leader compares the protesters demanding to stop the majority legislative blitz – he wants to downsize the Supreme Court, the magistrates, the judges, subject them to the scrutiny of the prosecutor’s executive branch – to the settlers who moved into the country last Sunday jail when they stormed the Palestinian village of Hawara to avenge the killing of two of them nearby. He equates the protests against him with what a senior Israeli general has called a Jewish pogrom.
The Boys of the Hills – raised on the ideology that the Arab territories conquered in 1967 were under Israeli law and a wild west to be tamed – set fire to forty houses and burned fifty cars, partly inspired by support for extremist fringe groups inside the coalition in power. The US State Department called the words of Bezalel Smotrich, Treasury Secretary and Settler Party leader, disgusting and repulsive and proclaimed: Hawara must be wiped off the map, but I think the State of Israel should do it, not individuals.
Mar 2, 2023 (Modified Mar 2, 2023 | 5:36pm)
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