"Offended? Great": Yair Netanyahu intensifies the confrontation with Britain

British anger over his words

Yair Netanyahu began his remarks with a direct address:

"Dear British people, you were offended by my comment about the Falkland Islands - a pile of rocks 8,000 miles from your shores? Great," he wrote, adding that this is exactly how Israelis feel in the face of the British government's policy towards Israel.

According to him, the British Labour government's recognition of "Palestine" harms the historical homeland of Israelis in Judea and Samaria, alongside the denial of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, the country's capital, and the Golan Heights. Netanyahu also attacked what he called Britain's "constant interference" in Israel's internal affairs and "slander" against the country.

Netanyahu emphasized that unlike the remote Falkland Islands, these are territories located at the heart of the State of Israel, whose total size is roughly similar to the size of Wales.

Further in his remarks, Netanyahu addressed the British criticism of Israel's response to the October 7 events in Gaza. He claimed that if Britain had experienced a similar attack - an invasion by a terrorist organization that killed, raped, tortured, and kidnapped thousands of Britons while firing thousands of rockets at its cities - its response would have been much harsher than the Israeli one.

To strengthen his argument, Netanyahu recalled historical and more recent chapters of British military activity: he noted that Britain destroyed Germany in World War II while killing millions of German civilians, and that the number of casualties from British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq was much higher than in Gaza - even though those two countries did not attack Britain and did not pose a direct threat to it.

He concluded the tweet by claiming that since October 7, which he calls "the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust," Israel has received nothing from the British government but hostility, antisemitism, and blood libels - adding that "an alliance is a mutual thing."

The storm over Yair Netanyahu's first tweet

The current tweet comes against the backdrop of a wave of anger that Netanyahu Jr. himself sparked in Britain two days earlier. At that time, he publicly stood with Argentine President Javier Milei and claimed that the Falkland Islands - a sparsely populated British island group near the southern coast of South America - actually belong to Argentina, as part of the historical sovereignty dispute between the two countries over the islands.

The statement sparked significant anger among figures on the British right. Among the prominent responders was Member of Parliament Rupert Lowe, from the "Reform UK" party, who wrote in response that Netanyahu "has enough problems to focus on in Israel," and emphasized that the Falkland Islands are British and will remain so, and that the British government "would go to war if necessary" to ensure this.

Now, two days after that initial storm, Netanyahu Jr. chose not to back down from his position, and instead continued to touch on the subject while expanding the front - this time by directly addressing the British public and explicitly linking the Falklands affair to the complex of disputes between Israel and Britain regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Gaza.