Blue and White co-chairman Benny Gantz on Thursday filed a libel suit for half a million shekels ($140,000) against Navarone (Nava) Jacobs, an Israeli expatriate living in New York, NY, who wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday that committed an inappropriate act against her when they were both in their youth, around 1976.
Jacobs and Gantz both attended a boarding school called HaKfar HaYarok (The Green Village) near Ramat HaSharon in Metropolitan Tel Aviv at roughly the same time.
According to Gantz’s statement, he is suing Jacobs for “publishing a post on Facebook with false accounts of various acts she claimed I committed.”
The lawsuit states that “this is a false and fabricated post from beginning to end … a true blood libel.”
According to Gantz, he “does not remember any acquaintance with the defendant, and in any case the fantastic story she invented in her feverish mind never happened.”
According to the plaintiff, “Jacobs acted on a mission from or with the help of interested political operators to discredit and humiliate Gantz. Her claims were raised a few weeks before the Knesset elections, and just ahead of the expected publication of the Attorney General’s decision on the Prime Minister’s indictments.”
Ganz added that he “regards severely all manner of inappropriate sexual conduct, and believes that such claims should be taken seriously.” With that in mind, Gantz announced that he would contribute to a public charity any amount he would be awarded by the court.
On Wednesday, Jacobs claimed that Gantz had harassed her when she was 14. When she tried to escape, she recalled, he blocked her way until his friend arrived and pulled him away.
Jacobs quoted a friend who had told her that Gantz had harassed his younger sister in the same manner when she was seven.
Jacobs responded to news of the lawsuit with another Facebook post that said: “Gantz is suing me? And he says he will donate the money? Why, is the judge a friend of his that he’s so sure he would win? You will not win, the truth will come out! I am the victim!”