Anat Waxman, a successful stage and television actress, insulted many fellow Israelis with her derisive description of Likud voters on Channel 2 Sunday.

Among other things, she referred to them as “the chocolates,” a reference to the infamous “chocolate” video that documented two drunk Israeli couples harassing an air steward who did not serve them chocolate when they demanded it.

“You can’t talk to them,” she said, and mimicked the way Netanyahu supporters supposedly speak. “These are laborers,” she added. “These are two different nations.”

Waxman’s interview is seen by some as an expression of the current peak tension between the old Israeli elites, which consistently vote Left, and the up-and-coming elites, which tend to the Right. While Waxman herself is half Iraqi, half Ashkenazi, it also appears to reveal bad blood between certain secular Ashkenazi elites and what they perceive as the masses of unsophisticated Mizrachi and religious Jews who, in the words of poet Yair Garbuz, “kiss amulets and prostrate themselves on holy men’s graves.” 

Garbuz’s election rally speech, which came to be known as the “mezuzah kissers’ speech,” is considered to have been a factor in swaying angry voters to vote for Netanyahu, just to spite Garbuz and his ilk.