Blue and White Party chairman and former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz is suing a woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct nearly 40 years ago.
Navarone Jacobs, otherwise known as “Nava,” posted to Facebook that Gantz cornered her in a barnyard at the Hakfar Hayork boarding school in Israel when she was 14 years old, approaching her, looking at her menacingly and laughing as he inappropriately revealed himself.
“In the last few weeks, I have seen Benny Gantz in the media, and the whole incident came back to me as if it had happened only yesterday,” she wrote on Facebook. “Everyone sees Benny Gantz, the man and the commander, and I see Benny Gantz the pervert, who did had no mercy on a frightened little girl and destroyed her life.”
She continued, “For many years, I remembered his terrifying and threatening eyes when he looked at me and held his erect penis in front of me,” Jacobs wrote.
The accusation was first reported by Israel’s Channel 13 news.
Jacobs alleges that she was a freshman at the same high school where Gantz was a senior and claims friends intervened before the incident escalated.
The Blue and White Party issued a statement calling the accusations a “blatant lie” and accused the rival Likud Party of a “new low” of “baseless slander” against Gantz.
Likud responded that is “not connected to the publication about Benny Gantz on social media.”
However, Israel’s Walla news site said that Culture Minister Miri Regev, a member of Likud, had been in contact with the accuser weeks before the allegation surfaced. Regev’s office said she was aware of the claims by Jacobs, and that they helped her get in touch with reporters.
The school CEO at Hakfar Hayarok, Dr. Kobi Naveh, confirmed that the two were in school at the same time, but said he believed Gantz to be a “moral and straightforward person,” and said Gantz had not given “even the slightest indication of sexual misconduct” during his time at the institution.
Naveh said Jacobs left the school after ninth grade—that “no one remembers why she left,” and that nothing was reported about it.
Jacobs told The Jerusalem Post that she moved to New York in 1980 and developed fibromyalgia. She also said the incident caused her to distrust men, and that she never married.
Jacobs claimed that she was previously not well enough to go public with her accusations, but told the Post that “I am not going to let someone like that run for prime minister when I know what he did.”
