Ron Kobi will pay 380,000 shekels for slander he spread about his predecessor in office

December 24, 2023   

Losing time and time again: Rabia Jabali, a judge in the Safed court, ruled today (Sunday) that former Tiberias mayor Ron Kobi will compensate his predecessor in office, Yossi Ben-David, with 380,000 shekels, including expenses and attorney's fees. The two former Tiberias mayors met in court in Safed, after Ben-David sued Kobi for 58 Facebook posts against him, in which he claimed that he was corrupt and committed criminal offenses. The judge did not accept Kobi's claim of good faith or expressing an opinion about a public figure and ruled that some of the posts were defamation. Ben-David, who was serving as mayor at the time of the Facebook posts, sued Kobi through attorney Ron Levintel, who at the time was a competing candidate for the position, and was later elected mayor and replaced the plaintiff. According to a report in Israel Hayom, Attorney Levintel claimed in the lawsuit that his client suffered enormous damage from the negative propaganda that Kobi created, with the intention to harm him and with malice. He also claimed that the intention to harm with malice can be learned from the obsessiveness, consistency, repetition, and harsh style of the publications. On the other hand, Ron Kobi claimed that the plaintiff suffered no damage, because he did not intend to harm him, and that the publications were intended to help the public and were made for his benefit. [Gallery] The judge noted in the ruling that the legal proceedings were conducted for an unnecessarily long period of time - for about 6 years, and that this duration is largely due to Kobi's conduct. "We are not dealing with a one-time publication, but with an advertising campaign that lasted a long period of time in 2016-2017," she wrote in her decision. "The publications were made with intensity and high frequency, and during certain periods the publication was made on a daily basis. The defendant did not retract the publications, did not remove them, repeated the statements during the proceedings and did not apologize. The defendant's conduct, his offensive and systematic statements towards the plaintiff and others, require the application of future deterrent considerations towards him.".