Netanyahu, Druze leaders spar over ‘apartheid’ criticism

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily “walked out of a meeting with Druze leaders on Thursday evening when a prominent Druze activist and former IDF brigadier general angrily criticised the controversial nation-state law passed last month”, reported the Times of Israel.

The meeting came ahead of a planned protest in Tel Aviv tomorrow “organised by Druze activists and fellow opponents of the nation-state law in its current iteration”.

According to reports, Netanyahu was angered by a recent Facebook post from one of the meeting’s participants, Brigadier General (res.) Amal Assad, in which he accused the premier of taking Israel on a trajectory to becoming an “apartheid state”.

When Netanyahu raised the issue of the post with Assad, the latter replied that he stood behind his statements. Netanyahu then said he wouldn’t accept such an “insult to the dignity of the prime minister of Israel and the dignity of the state”.

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“I hadn’t even brought up the subject of apartheid in the meeting. Netanyahu was addressing the things I had written on Facebook in recent days,” said Assad. “I stand behind those statements, but Netanyahu is the one who suddenly brought them up in the meeting to torpedo it.”