Group of disheartened voters call to punish periphery for election results
A new Facebook page called Lo Latet ('Do Not Give') urges to no longer donate to underprivileged municipalities that voted in favor of Likud.
By LIDAR GRAVÉ-LAZIPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog, Co-leader of the centre-left Zionist Union, are pictured together as campaign billboards rotate in Tel Aviv(photo credit: REUTERS)
The final results of the tumultuous election left a significant portion of the public in dismay and exacerbated rifts across all sectors of society. Some disheartened voters have taken their frustration to another level, lashing out on social media against right-wing voters in the socio-geographic periphery.A new Facebook page, Lo Latet (“Do Not Give”), which was established following the election results, has blamed voters in the periphery for the election outcome and called on people to no longer donate to the underprivileged municipalities that voted in favor of the Likud.“Residents of Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beersheba and the rest of the ‘southern periphery’ – those suffering the most from the rule of Bibi who brought Kassam [rockets], wars, unemployment and a sense of deprivation – they told him yes.Again. Forty percent and more of them put ‘Mahal’ (the Likud letters) in the polls. Solidarity is over, or as one politician said: ‘We will no longer apologize,’” the group posted on its Facebook wall.The organizers of the page, who have chosen to remain anonymous, have said that they are not affiliated with any political group or bloc but are rather bringing forth their own “private protest.”“We are a group of people from the middle class. We are not bound under any political framework and we have no desire to belong to any political party or NGO.After we received the results of the elections and we realized that these results will deepen the gap between the classes and will further add to the burden of the middle class. we decided to bring our truth to the social network,” the organizers wrote.The page initially garnered only a few dozen likes, but following media exposure last week, initially by Globes, it has to date garnered a few thousand more likes. Despite this, the page has also drawn hundreds of critical posts from people across the political spectrum, with the majority criticizing the movement as “shameful” and calling the organizers “racist.”The movement has also drawn criticism from a number of politicians both on the Right and on the Left, including Zionist Union party leader Isaac Herzog.“The repulsive reactions that are running on the social network since yesterday and the attempts to characterize the Likud voters in ugly and racist colors are just as dangerous as Bibi’s calls against Arabs in Israel,” he wrote.Eran Weintraub, director- general of Latet, an apolitical organization that provides assistance to needy populations in Israel, also issued a statement in response.“In recent days we ran into an attempt to stimulate a narrative calling ‘not to give.’ We believe that this represents a handful [of people] who do not represent general opinion, and we think that now is the time to connect rather than divide and to relay to the decision-makers a message of solidarity. We have no other society; we have no other country. Our war is against poverty, which can be found in all sectors of Israeli society, not a war among us,” he wrote in response on the organization’s Facebook page.
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