Candidate Hoping For Lurid Sex Scandal So He Can Blame Media (PreOccupied Territory)

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Jerusalem, September 3 - With Likud’s list taking shape and the October 27 election just weeks away, an embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told people around him that a lurid sex scandal would not be the worst thing that could happen to the campaign — provided it is large enough that he can spend the autumn attacking Channel 12, Haaretz, and “the left’s studios” for putting it on air, and perhaps ride the manufactured public outrage to an underdog victory.

The hope, described by two people who have heard the proposal in private, is not that Israelis will forgive the conduct, though the public has previously treated Netanyahu's peccadilloes as no big deal. It is that the conduct will be so vivid — a hotel, a phone, a power gap — that every subsequent question can be treated as proof the press is the story. Public polling keeps dragging the race back to October 7, the failure to heed warnings of it, the wars that followed, the hostage crisis, the cost of living, and whether the longest-serving prime minister should get another term. Those subjects force him to defend a record. A sex scandal would let him defend a headline.

“If it’s small, it looks like character,” an ally said. “If it’s a circus, it looks like a hit. We know how to campaign against a hit.” The ally asked not to be named, which in this political-media ecosystem has become less a legal caution than a habit.

No such allegation is circulating. That, in the current telling, is an opening the media has irresponsibly failed to provide. Draft statements already exist in two piles. One denies everything and demands the raw material. The other concedes “personal matters,” condemns “the timing,” and notes that nobody is asking about the attorney general, the judges, or the Opposition bloc’s donors. The second pile is thicker: it already contains the potent “they’re trying to decide the election in the editing room.”

Sympathetic panelists have been sounded out, hypothetically, for vocabulary: “feeding frenzy,” “same old junta,” “they never do this when it's their people.” None suggested waiting to establish whether a story was true.

Polls show the Netanyahu-aligned bloc falling below the 61-seat majority required for him to retain power. Formerly-effective strategies such as portraying himself as the only credible choice for a secure Israel ring hollower in the aftermath of the October 7 debacle.

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