Netanyahu’s party considers legal action over April Fool’s prank

An April Fool’s Day prank that led Israelis into believing that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was appointing an Arab education minister could result in legal action by his angered party, a spokesman said.

A Facebook post on what appeared to be Netanyahu’s official page on the social networking site announced that the ministerial post would be given to Ayman Odeh, the head of an Arab political coalition.

“Even though I know the appointment will be received with harsh criticism from both my party and future coalition, whether we like it or not, Arabs and Jews were destined to live side by side in this land together and I was elected to be the prime minister of everyone,” the post – which was written in Hebrew – said.

Netanyahu-April-fool

However, the post was fictional, and was not on Netanyahu’s official Facebook page, which has almost 1.3 million followers.

Not amused

Yet Netanyahu’s Likud party – which holds 30 out of 120 seats in the country’s parliament - was not amused.

A Likud spokesperson said that the party’s legal advisor would “mull legal action in order to prevent and address instances of forgery and impersonations of the prime minister on the Internet in general and Facebook in particular,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Last month, during the fever of a hotly-contested election in which Netanyahu emerged as the victor, the Israeli prime minister warned that Arab Israelis - who number about 20 percent of the country’s population – were voting “in droves.”

Netanyahu the apologized, saying he viewed himself as the prime minister of all Israelis, “without any prejudice based on religion, ethnicity or gender.”

Yet Odeh did not accept his apology.