Netanyahu Attempts To Douse Crypto Firestorm

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is walking back a rare election-eve blunder that could nevertheless damage his efforts to maintain his position at Israel’s helm. On Saturday the premier attempted to tamp down an earlier statement in which he told a television interviewer that the Israeli economy will need to resort to cryptocurrencies to evade potential American sanctions. The opposition seized on the statement, as did the Bank of Israel. Even some of Israel’s most adamant American supporters were critical. “Crypto is only one measure” to bypass sanctions, Mr. Netanyahu told Channel 14, “and I’m not sure we will use it, I hear the pushback.” The premier’s latest explanation was seen as an attempt to somewhat reverse a rare loss of narrative control by a politician known for his command of the television medium. The political firestorm started on Friday night. “We need to prepare ways to evade banking sanctions through an alternative economic system.” Mr. Netanyahu told a Channel 10 interviewer. “You know what that means, the currencies that can bypass them. I’m working on that too.” That is “very correct,” he added when asked if by bypassing he meant cryptocurrencies. “Bibi is going off the rails,” an opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said. A former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, added that Mr. Netanyahu’s vision is of an “isolated Israel, a world outcast that is detached from the global academia, technology, and trade, forcing us into a crypto economy.” Mr. Netanyahu’s isolationism will “collapse our national security,” added the poll-leading candidate for the premiership, Gadi Eisenkot. Other critics warned against becoming a modern day “Sparta.” The most painful blow came from the independent Bank of Israel. “Cryptocurrencies cannot serve as a way to circumvent sanctions,” the central bank, which rarely intervenes in political affairs, said in a statement. Israel, it added, needs to “preserve our economic relationships with our major trading partners and focus on preventing sanctions and their negative impact on the economy.” On Saturday night Mr. Netanyahu went on channel 14 television, considered the premier’s most adamant press supporter, to highlight the undeniable economic success under his leadership as prime minister. Mr. Netanyahu noted that Israel is fighting back, including by retaliating against the British Labour-led government’s recent sanctions. He added that he respects and hears the Bank of Israel’s advice.The premier, though, declined to completely disavow a future use of blockchain-based coin. In the Friday interview he sounded the alarm about Washington’s political trends. “If you think that we’ll continue to receive what I managed to bring in twice — tens of billion dollars from America to help our security — get used to it: This will be over because America has changed,” the premier said. Mr. Netanyahu has a point, referring to a growing number of Democratic politicians as well as some on the GOP side who are turning their backs on Israel and railing against aid to the Jewish state. American measures could extend beyond punishing wayward West Bank settlers, a former Department of Treasury official specializing on sanctions against Iran, Miad Maleki, warns. “And cryptocurrency would not provide a viable alternative,” he told Israel Hayom newspaper. Now with the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracy, Mr. Maleki notes that Israel, with $165 billion in annual exports, 56 percent of them services sold to Western companies, cannot build an alternative economy insulated from Western financial pressure. Under sanctions, he says, “Israel will not become Iran, but it will not be able to remain Israel either.”

Netanyahu Attempts To Douse Crypto Firestorm

Netanyahu Attempts To Douse Crypto Firestorm

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