Analysis: Will the 'Monkey' Slur Actually Move the Election? History Says Probably Not

When Channel 14 commentator Yinon Magal called Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot a "monkey" last weekend, pro-Netanyahu voices were quick to invoke a specific historical precedent: comedian Dudu Topaz's notorious 1981 jab at Mizrahi Likud supporters, widely credited with helping tip that election to Menachem Begin. The comparison is politically loaded, and worth examining on its own terms rather than taking the parallel at face value.

The 1981 episode worked, to the extent it did, because of a specific combination of factors: Begin's own oratorical power to capitalize on the backlash, a two-bloc political landscape with few alternatives for angry voters to channel their response into, and a slower news cycle that let the controversy dominate public attention for days rather than hours. None of those conditions holds in quite the same way today.

Eisenkot is not Begin, and has never built his campaign around that kind of raw oratorical appeal. Israel's party system is also far more fragmented than it was in 1981, giving voters who might be offended by Magal's remark plenty of places to register that reaction besides a single opposition leader. And practically, the controversy barely had time to set before Donald Trump's endorsement of Netanyahu, delivered hours later, pulled the news cycle's attention elsewhere entirely.

None of that means the remark is cost-free for Likud. Magal's claim that "monkey" referenced underworld slang rather than ethnicity has not stopped Mizrahi voters from reading it as exactly what Yashar's own statement called it, and Netanyahu's response, condemning the remark while pivoting to argue his own supporters face worse, has not fully closed the story off either. But a single slur moving an already fragmented electorate by itself, the way the 1981 comparison implies, is a much harder case to make nine days before a vote this close.