Blue and White leader Benny Gantz’s campaign strategist Joel Benenson, who also served as chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, has made a number of inflammatory comments against U.S. President Donald Trump on social media, claiming that the president is using Israel to cover for his “blatant racism” and drawing comparisons between him and Adolf Hitler, JNS has learned.
In response to a tweet in July 2019, Benenson implied that Trump’s support for Israel is not genuine.
The tweets raise questions about the political advice Gantz is receiving regarding Trump’s recently released “Peace to Prosperity” Mideast plan.
In response to a claim that Trump was “paraphrasing the Nazi leader in his speeches,” Benenson tweeted on Oct. 28, 2018: “It was Hitler’s speeches. … It’s also where he would have learned Hitler’s demonizing term for the press: ‘lugenpresse.’ Trump’s translation is ‘Fake News.”
Benenson, who also served as a campaign strategist for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, joined the Gantz campaign last year as a strategist, with a focus on data analysis.
In September 2018, responding to reports of a resistance group within the U.S. administration, Benenson tweeted: “What’s the big deal here? Hasn’t there been a secret resistance inside the White House every time in history when we’ve had a deranged, narcissistic, lying, ignorant, bigot as President?”
In August of the same year, responding to Trump’s remarks on immigration, Benenson tweeted: “The @POTUS is a bigot. And any Republican who continues to remain silent about what Trump is, is either a political coward or a co-conspirator promoting his bigotry. Show some character for a change @GOP.”
Benenson also tweeted in July 2018 that Russian President Vladimir Putin is Trump’s “puppet master,” and that the president is trying to “bull**** the world.”
The discovery of Benenson’s tweets follows a report on Monday that Ronen Tzur, another senior Gantz adviser, who accompanied the Blue and White leader to Washington, D.C., for talks with Trump ahead of the reveal of the U.S. Mideast peace plan, had called the U.S. president “Donald Adolf Trump” and insinuated that he has colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted a campaign video last July attacking Blue and White for hiring Benenson, and demanding that Gantz and Blue and White No. 2 Yair Lapid fire him. The video pointed out that Benenson had told former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to stop inviting Israeli officials to public events and that he supported the “dangerous” nuclear agreement with Iran.
