An event featuring Jewish Home primaries candidate Ronen Shoval was disrupted by leftists Monday, and brought to an early end.
The event was held at Beit Hatefutzot in Tel Aviv University, and featured Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Robert Aumann. Minister Naftali Bennett was also scheduled to appear but did not make it, apparently because his flight to Israel from Paris – where he had attended the march in memory of the terror attack victims – had been delayed.
The disruption was pre-planned and occurred in two waves.
In the first wave, about 20 gay and lesbian activists got up from their seats and held up the rainbow flag that the homosexual community rallies around. The largest version of the flag had a Star of David at the center, offering an alternative to Israel’s national flag.
The lesbians screamed epithets like “homophobes” in anger against the Jewish Home, which recently published a video in which most of its candidates in the primaries voiced opinions against recognizing homosexual “marriage.”
The shouting lasted about ten or 15 minutes and the disruption only ended when police arrived. Screams of indignation could be heard for at least another 30 minutes from outside the hall. Supporters of Shoval drowned out the provocateurs’ shouting with loud singing.
The second wave occurred when Shoval spoke. This time, about 20 activists from the Givat Amal neighborhood in Tel Aviv held up signs and shouted slogans against Construction and Housing Uri Ariel of Jewish Home, whom they blamed for recent evictions of tenants at the neighborhood.
Members of the audience and supporters of Shoval kept their cool and did not use force against the rowdy provocateurs. The event’s presenter, journalist Emily Amrousi, accused the provocateurs of being violent “right-wingophobes,” “religiousophobes” and “settlerophobes.” She said that the elites in Israel were changing and that the old elite is unable to accept that.
The event was ended ahead of time but the disruption continued even as the audience sang the national anthem.
Shoval is the charismatic founder of grassroots Zionist organization Im Tirtzu and one of the most effective enemies of the New Israel Fund. He is seen as having a good chance of making it into a realistic spot on the Jewish Home Knesset list despite being secular. This prospect may be one of the reasons that leftists chose to disrupt his event, less than 48 hours before the primaries.