Ofer Winter's new party is under sustained attack this week after a video surfaced showing Yosef Haddad, the party's No. 2 candidate, saying five years ago that he supported a two-state solution.
The clip, from an interview Haddad gave to Saudi television around 2019, has been circulating widely on Israeli social media. Right-wing activists are now demanding that Haddad disavow the statement in Arabic, not only in Hebrew.
Writer Hillel Gershuni weighed in, calling the episode "a death blow to Winter's party." He wrote: "Yosef Haddad is on record supporting a Palestinian state. Even if he says now that he's changed his mind, this is the kind of thing that vetting should have caught before he was brought on board. A shame, it was actually interesting."
Responses to Gershuni's post included: "Yes, that settled my doubts," and "Haddad has to retract what he said."
Haddad himself addressed the storm, saying: "I saw that they put out an edited video from an interview I gave over five years ago on Saudi television, being spread on the networks with the headline 'Yosef Haddad supports the Palestinians and a Palestinian state.'"
"This isn't the first time they've spread lies against me or against my party. Luckily, you know my work over the years and you know what my views are, and you're familiar with my content in Hebrew, English and Arabic."
"By the same token, you could pull out a photo of Netanyahu shaking Arafat's hand as if it were from today and try to make a story out of it. In that same interview, by the way, I refuted the apartheid lie, I spoke about Iran being the real threat, and I defined Hamas as a terror organization."
