Star Metro - As Israeli election nears, campaign turns ugly

Fuelled in part by a boom in AI-generated images flooding social media, candidates and activists are seeking to portray their opponents as weak, untrustworthy or damaging for the country as they play on stereotypes and fears to sway public opinion.

The electioneering has at times turned personal, with some candidates who lost loved ones in the wars following Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack even having their bereavement dragged into the campaign.

Ahead of Tuesday's vote, polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc neck and neck with that of his main centre-right rival Gadi Eisenkot.

On Wednesday, Eisenkot posted a video on X wishing Netanyahu a happy 77th birthday that featured a slate of AI-generated characters including a Hamas member speaking from a tunnel.

"What can we wish for the person who has been protecting us for 20 years?" the militant says, evoking theories that the premier has deliberately helped the Islamist movement stay in power in Gaza, charges vehemently denied by Netanyahu.

Soon after, an AI depiction of Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei pops up, telling Netanyahu: "One more round without victory and I'll make you a bomb as a present."

Netanyahu has also liberally weaponised AI-generated content against his rival.

In July, he posted a video depicting Eisenkot rejecting a hug from a young man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Israel unity" and instead embracing Arab-Israeli candidate Mansour Abbas.

The clip sparked widespread outrage over claims the young man had been made to resemble Eisenkot's son who was killed fighting in Gaza in 2023, something Netanyahu's party denied.

In an interview broadcast by Channel 13, Eisenkot said he had felt "deep contempt for Netanyahu and his entourage" after watching the video.

Netanyahu's camp has used AI throughout the campaign to stoke fears over a possible opposition coalition including Arab-Israeli parties.

Clips have ranged from Jewish opposition politicians taking off masks to reveal Arab-Israeli candidates underneath, to Arabs looming over what appears to be a crumbling parliament building.

Billboards for Netanyahu's Likud party with the phrase "The Right or Palestine" alongside the faces of Arab-Israeli politicians have also sprung up across the country.

"It's incitement, especially from Prime Minister Netanyahu's camp," said Thair Abu Ras, head of the Forum for Regional Thinking at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

"This whole notion of having an Arab party in the coalition is illegitimate in the eyes of the right wing and they're trying to enforce that kind of way of thinking on the Eisenkot coalition as well," he told AFP.

Apparently racialised comments have been levelled at Eisenkot, the son of Moroccan Jews.

This month, a senior commentator on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 television station described him as "a monkey".

While the term is not necessarily a racial slur in Hebrew, the remark drew widespread condemnation from opposition politicians and from Netanyahu himself.

- 'Disgusting' social media comments -

The election is the first since Hamas's October 2023 attack.

A number of candidates are people whose lives were transformed that day or in the wars that followed, but trauma or bereavement have not spared them from personal attacks.

Laly Derai, whose son was killed fighting in Gaza in 2024, is running for the new far-right Amcha Israel party, which advocates universal conscription into the Israeli military -- an increasingly contentious issue due to exemptions for religious students.

She says she has faced a coordinated smear campaign against her, which has at times invoked her son's death and accusations that she is betraying his memory.

Posters calling for her to withdraw her candidacy so as not to "put the country in danger" have sprung up in the area around the settlement where she lives in the occupied West Bank.

"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.

Speaking to public broadcaster KAN, she said she had received "phone calls at all hours of the day and night, disgusting comments on social media, signs posted in our towns, including near our children's school buses -- all of this just because we dared to propose something new."

Relatives of hostages formerly held by Hamas have also been caught in the crosshairs.

On an unofficial Facebook page for supporters of Netanyahu's Likud party, an image was posted on Tuesday pitting one mother of a former hostage against another.

One mother, Likud candidate Talik Gvili, looks calm against the backdrop of an Israeli flag, while Einav Zangauker -- a vocal critic of Netanyahu -- looks frenzied around protesters tinted in red.

"It is us or them," the caption reads.

S.Cloutier--SMC