Netanyahu Loyalty Necklace Gets Mixed Reviews

By Yisrael Price

YERUSHALAYIM — Some people are known to wear their hearts on their sleeve; others wear their loyalty around their neck.

Loyalists of opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu were offered a necklace with a gold medallion featuring his face etched on one side next to a Star of David, which was made available to attendees of a Likud political event on Sunday evening.

The necklace, presented by Likud primary candidate Heidi Mozes, was not well received by everyone.

“We are proud to be in this party, in which we have excellent representatives and a soon-to-be prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,” Mozes said, as she had the necklace placed on Likud MK Yisrael Katz. “This is a declaration of loyalty,” she added, reports the Jerusalem Post.

Katz, who has long nursed ambitions to succeed Netanyahu as Likud leader,  immediately removed the necklace.

“Yesterday, at a gathering in Givat Ze’ev, someone tried to put a necklace around my neck,” Katz tweeted on Monday morning. “I never wear necklaces and therefore as you can see in the video – I immediately removed it without knowing what it was. I would not have responded to such an unimportant episode, if the media had not tweeted: ‘Yisrael Katz wore a necklace with the figure of Bibi.’ This is what biased falsification looks like,” Katz wrote. 

Netanyahu himself disavowed the idea.

“No medallion or declaration of loyalty is necessary,” he said in a video. “The loyalty that we need is loyalty to our values and principles. Safeguarding the Land of Israel, Israel’s security, the fight against Iran, a free-market economy, lowering of prices, the high cost of living; These are the real things,” he said.

Nevertheless, the necklace’s designer, Raz Pereg, told Ynet that his phone had not stopped ringing all morning with requests to buy it, for 79 or 99 shekels, for silver or gold, respectively.