AI smears and a 'monkey' jibe: Israel's election fight turns vicious

Israel votes on Oct 27, and the campaign has curdled into something nastier than a policy fight. Polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc dead level with the centre-right alliance led by his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, according to straitstimes.com. With the race that tight, the closing days have brought personal jabs, inflammatory attacks and a flood of AI-generated imagery that has repeatedly crossed red lines.

Eisenkot fired first this week. On Oct 21 he marked Netanyahu's 77th birthday with a video on X stocked with AI-generated characters, including a Hamas militant speaking from a tunnel and mocking the premier as the man who has "been protecting us for 20 years" — a wink at the disputed claim that Netanyahu propped up Hamas in Gaza, which he has vehemently denied. The clip also conjures a version of Iran's supreme leader warning that one more round without victory would earn Netanyahu a bomb as a gift.

Netanyahu's side has swung just as hard. In July he posted a video showing Eisenkot brushing off a hug from a young man in an "Israel unity" T-shirt and instead embracing Arab-Israeli politician Mansour Abbas. Outrage followed over suggestions the young man was made to look like Eisenkot's son, killed fighting in Gaza in 2023 — a claim Netanyahu's party denied. Eisenkot told Channel 13 he felt "deep contempt for Netanyahu and his entourage" after watching it.

The Likud machine has leaned on AI throughout to spook voters about an opposition coalition that would include Arab-Israeli parties. Clips show Jewish opposition politicians peeling off masks to reveal Arab-Israeli candidates beneath, or Arabs towering over a crumbling parliament. Billboards reading "The Right or Palestine" have also gone up nationwide, stamped with the faces of Arab-Israeli politicians. "It's incitement, especially from Prime Minister Netanyahu's camp," Thair Abu Ras, head of the Forum for Regional Thinking at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, told AFP, arguing the right is pushing the idea that an Arab party in government is illegitimate.

Eisenkot, the son of Moroccan Jews, has been on the receiving end too. In October a senior commentator on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called him "a monkey" — a word that isn't necessarily a racial slur in Hebrew, but the remark drew condemnation from opposition politicians and from Netanyahu himself.

Grief has been no shield. Laly Derai, whose son was killed in Gaza in 2024, is running for the new far-right Amcha Israel party, which wants universal military conscription — a hot-button issue given exemptions for religious students. She says she has been hit by a coordinated smear campaign invoking her son's death, with posters near her West Bank settlement urging her to quit so she doesn't "put the country in danger." To KAN she described calls at all hours, vile social media comments and signs posted near her children's school buses. "They're trying to break me but, paradoxically or not, this campaign has reinforced my decision to enter politics precisely to put an end to this hate-filled rhetoric," she told AFP. Relatives of hostages have been dragged in as well: on Oct 20 an unofficial Likud supporters' Facebook page posted an image contrasting the calm of Likud candidate Talik Gvili, mother of a freed hostage, with a frenzied-looking Einav Zangauker, a vocal Netanyahu critic, ringed by red-tinted protesters. The caption: "It is us or them."