Blue and White happy about Labor’s attack ads

The ads accuse Blue and White of being not centrist, as the party of former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz portrays itself, but right-wing.

By GIL HOFFMAN
A Labor campaign attack ad against the Blue and White Party, March 11, 2019 (Courtesy)
The Labor Party began a strategy of attacking the Blue and White Party on Monday, earning surprising praise from the Israel Resilience, Yesh Atid and Telem alliance.
The ads accuse Blue and White of not being centrist, as the party of former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz portrays itself, but right wing. The new slogan is “Blue and White is Right.” (In Hebrew, Right does not also mean correct.)
Labor shifted its strategy in the ads from attacking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to trying to woo voters from its main competition on the Center-Left.
The stars of the ads are former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon and the recruits of his Telem Party that joined Blue and White, Yoaz Hendel and Zvi Hauser.
Hendel is shown saying that his ideology is that of Likud. Hauser is quoted saying in an interview with Yediot Aharonot that: “We will build in the settlements no less than Netanyahu.”
The ads also quote Blue and White’s number two candidate Yair Lapid saying that the first call Blue and White would make after winning the April 9 election would be to Likud to build a national unity government. Lapid, Gantz and other Blue and White leaders have conditioned such a coalition on Netanyahu’s departure from politics.
Multiple sources in Blue and White said they were ecstatic about the ads and questioned whether Labor was running them at the behest of someone in their party.
“If we are attacked on the Right and Left, it keeps us in the center of the map,” one Blue and White candidate said. “These attacks on us balance the campaign of Netanyahu, who has been wrongly accusing us of being left-wing.”
A source in Blue and White revealed that Labor’s campaign has been especially helpful to the party in the sector of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
A Labor Party campaign official said the goal of the new campaign was “returning mandates [to us] that we lost to Blue and White, because they all went there, and nowhere else.”
When told that Blue and White was overjoyed about the ads, the Labor campaign official said “They should stop being happy with us and start attacking Netanyahu more.”