For 20 years, the slogan "Bibi or Tibi" has held up • The sea is the same sea - and the Tibetan? The demonization also remained exactly the same
20 years in the Likud campaign service
In the last 20 years, a lot has happened in the world: in the United States, a black president was first elected. President Mubarak was able to resign, stand trial and die. Britain left the EU. Spring Bar Zohar reached 300,000 followers on Instagram. Babies were born, people passed away, Couples met and separated, and there was only one thing left: "Bibi or Tibi" campaign.
Photo: Moshe Ben Simhon
Yes, 20 years this slogan lasts. Ehud Barak knows him well, and Netanyahu used it against him in the 1999 elections. Today, when he faces Gantz, this slogan is still with us, continues to star in the Likud videos. The sea is the same sea - and the Tibetan? A little heavier, less hairy, but the glasses and demonization stayed just as they were.
What earned Ahmed Tibi the great honor of starring in the Likud campaign for 20 years? The fact that he presented himself as Arafat's advisor, the provocative eloquence, but above all - the family name. The dive. The bead. Bibi-Tibi, short, poignant, rhythmic, catchy, pesky, the stuff from which every campaigner dreams. You hear it once and it gets absorbed, digested, like a cheap and satisfying falafel that tastes good with you over time, leaving a grit between your teeth no matter how much floss you used - you couldn't get it out.
How lucky is Netanyahu that Ahmad Tibi is called Ahmed Tibi. Imagine what they would call him Ahmed al-Arabid. Or Ahmed Masalha. Imagine a campaigner offering the slogan "either Bibi or Al-Arabid". At that moment, the relationship with him ends. For lame sentences you don't have to pay an advertising person, you can just pick up a phone for Miri Regev ..
If you ask young people who Ahmad Tibi is, most of them will not know his bio. They would not know what the nature of his relationship with Yasser Arafat was, if at all they would know who Arafat was. They will have no idea that Tibi a gynecologist, who for years has struggled to replace the term "Arab sector" with the words "Arab Israeli citizens" and that he speaks better Hebrew than most Israelis. For them he is a "terrorist", "terrorist", concept, concept, daemon. It is a danger, a fear, a third exile. The embodiment of all the nightmares, ISIS and Hamas and Jabhat a-Nusira, who are only looking to buy a one-and-a-half-room apartment near the Western Wall.
How lucky Netanyahu is to have Tibi. Without him, he would have had to face three indictments.
And something else: Everyone, except for the Galat graduates, has a pseudonym. Benny Gantz did not serve in the Galat, he was a kingfisher and the paratroopers and the chief of staff. He is not very eloquent, inexperienced in front of a camera, somewhat clumsy, very human. But Make him a person with a disorder - this is something that hurts not only him, but the entire State of Israel. In the world in general and in the Middle East in particular, there are those who see how the former chief of staff becomes, in some mistakes, insane - and more by the prime minister himself. Next time, when someone underestimates the IDF, don't come to him with allegations. Netanyahu and the Likud did so to lash out a few more votes.