In addition, it orders him to delete tweets he had posted online against protest leaders.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBYair Netanyahu, son of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seen in court in Tel Aviv on December 10, 2018, where he testified in a NIS 140,000 libel suit he filed last year against Abie Binyamin, a social activist.(photo credit: FLASH90)
The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court on Sunday slapped Yair Netanyahu with a restraining order that prohibits him from tweeting or publishing commentary about leaders of the protest movement against his father, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for the next six months.In addition, it ordered him to delete tweets he had posted online against the leaders of the “Crime Minister” protest movement.The court’s order was extraordinary. Yair Netanyahu has been sued before for defamation and accused of incitement in a general sense and issued some apologies, but he has never been preemptively restrained from tweeting against a particular person or group.Over the weekend, he published a tweet with the protest leaders’ home addresses and cellphone numbers and called on his tens of thousands of followers to protest at their residences and troll them.According to Israeli law, it is permitted to protest outside the residences of public figures. But the protest leaders, at least as of now, are considered private citizens.This means that when Yair Netanyahu tweeted their personal information and called for trolling them, he violated their privacy and exploited his enormous social-media presence in a concrete way. According to lawyers for the protest leaders, that has led to death threats.The three protest leaders who petitioned the court to intervene were Haim Shedmi, Yishai Hadas and Gonen Yitzhak, who is also a lawyer and represented all three activists before the court.Yitzhak described in detail the large amount of trolling and threats the three had received since Yair Netanyahu’s weekend tweet.In response, Yair Netanyahu’s lawyer, Yossi Cohen, said Shedmi had incited much worse against the entire Netanyahu family and was an anarchist and lawbreaker.He accused Yitzhak of unethical behavior and filing a spurious claim against Yair Netanyahu to get publicity.
Cohen demanded that the petition be dismissed and that the protest leaders be fined for wasting the court’s time.The court said Yair Netanyahu “did not present satisfactory explanations at the hearing regarding the intent of his tweet, did not reprimand his followers who called for violence and did not remove the tweet after seeing the violent dialogue that it provoked. This means there is a real concern that the respondent [Netanyahu] will later again harass” the protest leaders.Shortly after the decision, Netanyahu deleted his tweet. But he appeared unapologetic, accusing the court of unfairly ignoring evidence of the protest leaders’ themselves crossing the line.The court did view video and other evidence presented by Cohen, though it noted that it only showed Shedmi and not the two other petitioners.“Another brick in the Balfour Wall fell today,” the “Crime Minister” protest movement said in response to the court’s decision. “We will continue to demonstrate and fight until the impending victory.”
