The Central Election Commission accepted a petition filed against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party and the Reshet Channel and banned the broadcast of the segment in the “Stand-up Nation” program in which the prime minister was filmed earlier this week on Tuesday.
On Monday, Reshet promoted the program on it’s Twitter account under the caption “For the first time in Israel, a prime minister comes to do stand-up.”
The committee determined that the segment featuring Netanyahu, which was supposed to be broadcast on Tuesday night, was considered election propaganda and therefore the nine minutes in which it was supposed to appear should not be broadcast. In the decision, the committee’s chairman, Justice Uzi Vogelman, stated that although there is a purpose of entertainment in the section in question, throughout the section “messages are intertwined that are on the political agenda” such as presenting the complexity in an “alternate prime minister”, dealing with the coronavirus crisis and more.
The messages, according to Vogelman, “may in the eyes of the reasonable voter influence the vote.” Vogelman also states that the mention of Netanyahu’s accounts on social media during the program, will “with considerable probability” lead to a visit to these pages by some viewers, which will inevitably lead to their viewing of election propaganda published on these pages.
In addition, the committee’s chairman states that the prime minister’s participation in the program, “close to the election date and in light of the fact that the network knew they could not bring other political candidates due to the schedule, could create the impression that it was election propaganda.”
Finally, Vogelman ruled that although the segment was disqualified for broadcast during the election period, after March 23 there would be no impediment to its broadcast.
Network 13 reported that “The Central Election Committee has unfortunately not approved the broadcast of an excerpt from the Stand-up Nation program with the participation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, we promise you a funny, entertaining and especially enjoyable program.”
Some of the jokes planned for the program were published in the decision on Tuesday.
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For example, after the host of the program Shalom Asaig asks the prime minister “are you also waiting for the opening of Ben-Gurion Airport like us?” Netanyahu responds, “of course. Once I would stand in front of the United Nations for the state, now I need to show up on Stand-up Nation,” according to Maariv, The Jerusalem Post‘s sister publication.
At the beginning of the program, Netanyahu congratulates host Lital Schwartz. When Asaig remarks that he is also a host of the show, Netanyahu teases Defense Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz and says “I mean, you have an alternate host and a host. In my experience, it does not work so well.”
Immediately afterwards, the prime minister asks to “say something serious” and addresses the people of the cultural world. “I know you’ve had a very difficult year, everything is being done to bring the halls back to full occupancy for the simple reason that anything is better than me trying to make you laugh.”
The prime minister also referred to the normalization agreements he has signed in the past year. “People are wondering about the concessions we made for peace with the Emirates. I must share with you, the rumors are true, the agreement had a secret clause in which we pledged to give them Omer Adam every second Saturday,” Netanyahu joked.
The Likud Party posted its response to the ban on its official Twitter account: “We will appeal the decision to censor Prime Minister Netanyahu tonight on Channel 13. We are censored, while they are not censoring the caressing interviews of all other politicians on talk shows like Ofira and Berkovich or the political propaganda in ‘Eretz Nehederet.’ It is impossible for there to be one law for the Likud and another law for the rest!”
The other person who reacted to the decision was Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, who wrote on his Twitter account, “It is simply unbelievable that the chairman of the [Central] Election Commission, Justice Vogelman, whom no one elected, decided on his own initiative and without any authority, to ban the broadcasting of Netanyahu’s stand-up program with Shalom Asaig on television, because it was ‘election propaganda.’ Of course, he does not ban brainwashing and election propaganda for the left.”
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