Dismay in Israel as son of hard-line leader Netanyahu is revealed to be dating non-Jewish Norwegian blonde

Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair is dating 25-year-old Sandra Leikanger

Orthodox Israelis outraged that the Norwegian blonde is not Jewish

Yair and Sandra 'a couple' since July, with him visiting Norway in September



The son of Benjamin Netanyahu has caused outrage in Israel after it has been revealed that he is dating a Norwegian girl – who is not Jewish.

Yair Netanyahu, 23, has allegedly been seeing blonde communications student Sandra Leikanger, 25, since last summer and even visited her home country.

Their love affair was cabled out across the world after Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg revealed that Mr Netanyahu had been ‘boasting’ of his son’s relationship with Miss Leikanger, when they met at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

Young love: Benjamin Netanyahu's son Yair, 23, with his girlfriend, Norwegian student Sandra Leikangen, 25

Ms Solberg said that Netanyahu had spoken of ‘new friends’ and mentioned that his son had recently visited Norway with his girlfriend – Sandra from Grimstad in southern Norway.

Norwegian newspaper Dagen soon tracked down Miss Leikanger’s Facebook which had several photographs of the smiling couple, including one depicting the pair in the Norwegian archipelago, taken in September last year.

The story quickly spread to the newspaper gossip pages in Israel, and resulted in a backlash from orthodox Jewish organisations in the country.

On Monday, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said he believed the relationship actually caused Netanyahu and his wife great ‘heartache.’

Arieh Deri told a local radio station the relationship was no mere personal matter because Netanyahu is a ‘symbol of the Jewish people.’

Let the cat out: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pictured with his wife Sara, 'boasted' about his son's relationship, and recent trip to Norway, to the country's prime minister Erna Solberg in Davos last week

‘I know friends of mine who invest tens of millions and more, hundreds of millions to fight assimilation in the world,’ Deri told the Kol Barama station. ‘If God forbid it's true, woe to us.’

Other groups called on Netanyahu to put a stop to the relationship. Even the prime minister's brother in law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, took to the airwaves to speak out against it.

‘Yair should know that if he does such a thing, if he doesn't break off the relationship, then ... he is spitting on the graves of his grandmother and grandfather who loved him so much and raised him,’ Ben-Artzi told Kikar Shabbat, an ultra-Orthodox news site.

Miss Leikanger has not commented in Norwegian or Israeli media on her relationship with Yair whom she met at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, where they both study.

She has instead restricted her social network accounts. Mr Netanyahu the younger already has strict privacy settings on his, after he posted offensive comments regarding Arab-Israeli relations as a teenager.

Israel always had an ultra-Orthodox minority of devout and conservative Jews, who despite accounting for just under a tenth of the population, oversee weddings, divorces and burials.

As a result, should Miss Leikanger and Yair ever wish to tie the knot, she must convert to Judaism for them to be able to do so in Israel.

Yossi Sarid, a former Israeli education minister and onetime leader of the secular-rights party Meretz, called the younger Netanyahu's love life a ‘private matter.’ But he said the uproar among the religious was ‘nonsense.’

‘It's not fair. You can't expect fairness from those people,’ Sarid said. ‘They don't like non-Jews. They don't like non-Orthodox Jews. They are behaving as fanatics everywhere behave.’