This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The Knesset only dispersed last week, the election campaign has barely started, and already Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sunk to another low.

On Tuesday, his office produced, and he posted, a campaign video showing his main rival, Gadi Eisenkot, in a sunlit meadow, running past a handsome young man in a T-shirt emblazoned “Israeli unity” into the embrace of the Arab Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas. The unsubtle message: Eisenkot will do anything to win power, including forsaking a unified Jewish Israel and joining forces with Israel’s internal enemies.

But that calumny wasn’t the worst thing about the ad. This was an AI-generated clip. The prime minister and his campaign team could have chosen any nonexistent young man or woman for Eisenkot to ignore in his faked rush to join forces with the Arabs. But they generated, in their fake heavenly flower-filled field, a fake bearded man in his mid-20s who looks like Eisenkot’s own son Gal — an IDF reservist who was killed at age 25 while fighting in Gaza in December 2023. In other words, Netanyahu had his purportedly dastardly rival ignoring a beyond-the-grave Israel-unifying plea from his own fallen son.

Eisenkot’s campaign responded with a compilation of (genuine) clips showing how Netanyahu and his colleagues tried and failed to woo Abbas into their own coalition — inevitably giving the original toxic ad more resonance. And Netanyahu’s under-indictment top adviser Jonatan Urich then issued a follow-up ad, this time putting the “Israeli unity” T-shirt on an AI-generated woman.

גדי, זה לא ישר pic.twitter.com/awy47dINmq — Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) July 20, 2026

גדי, זה לא ישר pic.twitter.com/awy47dINmq

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) July 20, 2026

Needless to say, no apology has been forthcoming from Netanyahu for the despicable original ad.

Needless to say, even me writing about it here will generate further viewing. I’ll pay that price to make the following points:

Netanyahu wants to fight the October 27, 2026, election on the ostensible unsuitability of anyone but him to lead Israel. In fact, he has, tragically for this country, proved himself to be just about the last person who should run Israel. Having held power almost uninterrupted since 2009, and encouraged Qatar to help fund Hamas’s growing strength in Gaza, he failed to thwart the........

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