Netanyahu is already used to retouching the picture of reality

"Sir, your wife is a bombshell," Avi Shushan announced to the Prime Minister in the much-discussed interview he recently conducted with him on a podcast. Benjamin Netanyahu looked very pleased with the compliment – and a bit embarrassed, of course – and added: "She looks decades younger, it's a gift from God." And here, despite these definitive declarations, the Israeli public woke up this morning from its restless sleep (since it has not yet been decided where to spend the last month of summer vacation, in Greece or in a protected space) to discover that, nevertheless, it is not a "gift from God" but a "gift from Adobe Photoshop": once again, the Government Press Office, which continues to disgrace itself as if nothing happened, distributed photos of Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu from the visit to Washington after they underwent aggressive retouching on behalf of the "First Lady," as she was called by the Prime Minister's Office, even though the title actually belongs to the President's wife. When it comes to taking credit, it is indeed a "gift from God."

However, beyond the astonishment that Sara Netanyahu does not trust her husband's eyes and insists on looking "decades younger" through, well, forgery, the Netanyahu family's publicized conflict (including son Yair and the bizarre photos he recently published) with reality has escalated, and even by several levels: now, the photos of the Prime Minister himself have undergone, how to put it delicately, a process. It is not superfluous to note that the very fact that the photos are released on behalf of the Government Press Office, even if credit is given to Sara Netanyahu, is a desecration of an institution entrusted with documenting the history of the State of Israel as it is and not as the Netanyahu family wants to commemorate it.

But Netanyahu himself can be understood: after all, he will arrive at the upcoming elections a few days after celebrating his 77th birthday. This will be the first election campaign in which not only Netanyahu's actions and political conduct are on the agenda but also his health, also because 77 is no joke, and especially in light of the dubious and suspicious conduct surrounding the treatment he received for prostate cancer, as revealed last April. Although Netanyahu's rivals hesitate to play this card – the voices from the right that will decide the elections are not fond of the idea – but it is nice of him to do the work for them and raise the discussion himself: why suddenly does even the Prime Minister himself, one of the most photogenic leaders in the history of Israel (and not only hers), take care to clarify that even he injects technological Botox?

It seems that the potential answers to this question do not lie only in a doomed attempt to deny the ravages of time, which unfortunately cannot be smeared as "far-left" and described in an artificial intelligence video (which was warmly adopted, of course) as he runs to hug Mansour Abbas. The spread of the visual distortion obsession can also be interpreted as part of that deeper desire: to take the truth and choke it so hard that it cannot breathe. In other words: if it is possible to retouch Netanyahu's responsibility for the failures of October 7, why make a big deal out of retouching his facial skin? If he can tell Ben Ben Baruch's podcast, for example, that on the morning of October 7 he immediately gave an instruction to close the border, even though there is no documentation for this, why shouldn't he try to convince the public that he doesn't really look like a 77-year-old man? By the way, arriving at age 77 to elections that will be held in '27 and will deal quite a bit with October 7 can also be a trigger: too many sevens. Why don't you say there was a mistake in the records and you are actually 69? It explains the photos and also sounds much sexier. A bombshell, even."