Israeli PM shows off beefed-up border fence in #10YearChallenge post
With the #10YearChallenge craze sweeping social media, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu jumped aboard, showing off his progress erecting a concrete and barbed wire wall on the border with Egypt.
A lot can change in ten years. The selfies flooding social media in recent days show people growing older, more mature and wiser. Or, in Benjamin Netanyahu’s case, more fervently anti-immigration.
#10YearChallengepic.twitter.com/8rX4elCwmq
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) January 17, 2019
The Israeli leader posted a picture of a fortified barrier built along his country’s border with Egypt in the Sinai desert. Beside it was a picture of the same location in 2009, when the wall was still a waist-height wire fence, but offered far better views of the sweeping desert vista.
The PM’s tweet was quickly pounced on by anti-Israel activists, one of whom claimed Netanyahu’s brag showed Israel is a “deeply racist society.” Another accused him of “brazenly” allying himself with US President Donald Trump.
This is what Israel truly is: a far-right, deeply racist society in which the PM brags about building walls, in an obvious endorsement of Trump's own racist wall, while maintaining an illegal 52-year military occupation of indigenous Palestinians.Liberal Zionism is imaginary.
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 17, 2019
This isn’t a parody account https://t.co/0seiS8g06R
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) January 17, 2019
Democrats cannot stand by AIPAC and Netanyahu while he so brazenly allies with Trump. https://t.co/DQ7F7AlzuS
— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) January 17, 2019
Completed in 2012, the 200km Egyptian border fence cut illegal immigration to almost zero. While the fence attracted controversy, Netanyahu vigorously defended it, claiming it stopped terrorists entering Israel, as well as African migrants who would change Israel’s overwhelmingly Jewish demographic makeup.
“Attacks by terrorist groups in the Sinai, and the worst thing: A flood of illegal infiltrators from Africa,” Netanyahu said at a conference last March. “How could we have guaranteed a Jewish-democratic state with 50,000 and after that 100,000, and it would have reached 1.5 million [illegal immigrants]?”
Israel has also built walls along its borders with Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and parts of the West Bank.
Netanyahu’s wall-building efforts have been praised by Trump, currently locked into a political struggle with Congressional Democrats over his plans to build a barrier along the US’ southern border with Mexico.
.....on a Border is only effective in conjunction with a Wall. Properly designed and built Walls work, and the Democrats are lying when they say they don’t. In Israel the Wall is 99.9% successful. Will not be any different on our Southern Border! Hundreds of $Billions saved!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 21, 2018
“Walls work, just ask Israel,” he said during a press conference last May. Trump reiterated the same argument in December, tweeting “properly designed and built Walls work, and the Democrats are lying when they say they don’t. In Israel the Wall is 99.9% successful. Will not be any different on our Southern Border!”
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