Bennett on BBC “HardTalk”: “The first Palestinian State in Gaza a disaster; won’t create another”

7 Comments / 7 Comments

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2. Contrary to what Bibi loyalists above all are saying Bennett and Saar and their parties are working for the benefit of Israel as a whole. They are loyal to the state and its people. They are doing what is best for Israel (unlike Bibi).

   Unfortunately there was in the immediate situation no way to form a government without Raam. With ONE exception Bibi could have stepped down and within one day a stable right-wing government would have been formed. Likud members asked Bibi to do this but he refused. Perhaps the Likud will find a new Likud leader and this will benefit Israel. Edelsteing (#2 on Likud list) says he is now interested in challenging Bibi for the leadership.

   The new Unity government clearly has challenges ahead of it to be viable. Establishing the egalitarian prayer area at the Kotel is a good symbolic first step in doing something that the majority of Israelis favor. The UTJ and Shas have alienated many Israelis and diaspora Jews by stopping this. Bibi had promised to implement this but went back on his word on this to appease the blackmail of the Haredi parties.

   We should all hope the new Unity government succeeds for the benefit of Israel. Bibi had done many good things for Israel but he should NOT be allowed to hold it hostage for his own political and personal benefit. Bennett is doing something very brave he is risking his personal political future to get Israel out of a political stalemate. He should be supported and not derided.

   Israel patriots Bennett and Saar and their parties will try and help the government help the government pull Israel out of its paralysis. They will try and build two hospitals that are needed. They will try and get the military to be able to implement future plans. For all this and other things real world budgeting is needed to implement it. Also for the State is running in the red now and for Israel that is horrible precedent. Eventually its credit rating would be reduced and this has a serious impact on security and economic well-being of the country.

3. The vote will be Sunday and the swearing in. Which means by law Friday the Coalition Agreements will have to be published. By the way they are NOT all yet finalized that is one of the reasons that false reports and/or no reports have been coming out. Some reporting was on proposed agreements that were not approved.

   So people get all relied up on falsehoods.

4. @Peloni
   So you don’t trust Meretz and Ra’am. I think that these agreements require trade offs.. If Ra’am wanted approval if the Bedouin land grab, he would have had to approve something is return such as building in the settlements. The same goes for Meretz.
   Let’s see how it plays out.

5. For 14 members of the Right to walk away from their principles is a lot of betrayal. However, I read that the only ideologue amongst Yamina was the fellow who refused to vote for the gov’t and the others were tightly loyal to Bennett, still of the Right but loyal to Bennett first.

   It bothered me that the ideologue who quit(I forget his name at present) did so. He has, today, announced he will vote for the gov’t. I haven’t found a reason for his change of heart. As an ideologue, such dramatic steps as opposing your own gov’t should not fluctuate so easily. So I don’t know what to make of it.

   Likely everything that is read in these tabloids is false so I am actually considering investing in a comic book to find a better line of BS to supplement the nonsense I keep reading in the press. I do believe that Bennett should release his arrangements and prove the concerns of his Right wing base as baseless worries.

   He doesn’t do so for concern that Bibi will make specific charges against his agreements that could upend his gov’t. But unless these arrangements are very bad, it could not but help him win support from his own base – the many who distrust his requests for trust. Leadership requires knowing when to hold your cards close to the vest and when to trust the public and share the truth with them.

   This likely also causes concern among the Right. Now it is true, well, I read it on TOI so let’s qualify that, Bennett is suppose to be releasing his arrangements within 24hrs of the vote, so why wait. As I said before, I believe it would be an incredibly powerful moment if he could undermine his opposition’s claims, such as Bibi and Caroline, by doing so.

   But it is instinctively unrealistic to think the Dentist and his Jewish Hamas supporters in Meretz will support a strong Right wing agenda. And this is really where the concerns lie. Not in Bibi’s rhetoric or Caroline’s analysis or in Bennett’s call to trust him and his 14 members. Because Bennett is asking us to trust, but not just him and his 14 members of the Right – because the agreements must all be accepted by Abbas and Meretz.

   So we must be able to trust Bennett, his 14 members and people I would not trust with yesterday’s trash. And this is why I think Bibi’s comments resonate so well within the Right, when he couldn’t even get enough votes to support him in forming a gov’t. It’s not Bibi’s biblical references that stir worries about Bennett’s trustworthiness. Rather, it is the realization that in trusting Bennett, we are trusting Meretz and Abbas. And that requires a lot of trust.

6. Bennett said that the agreements will be published 24 hours before the vote. So I think Caroline is wrong to deny this.
   She also leaves out the fact that Bibi offered the same thing to Abbas before Bennett offered it. Bibi breached the divide, not Bennett.
   Remember Any party can veto initiative not in the agreements. Bennett has said he will not cede any land which prevents Lapid from pushing the two state solution when he is PM if he is PM.
   This government would not have come together without Bennett. He was in a very strong negotiating position. He may have insisted in building within the boundaries of the settlements. If he did, there will be a big building boom in J&S during his two years as PM.

   Finally, he has the support of all his MK’s who are staunch rightwingers and they have seen the agreements. Since its good enough for them, its good enough for me.

   It was always the case that only the right can give land away. Perhaps only the left can authorize settlement construction. Biden will be hard pressed to prevent it because it is approved by the left.

7. Carolyn Glick’s latest column, just published by Arutz Sheva. Why the secrecy, Bennett and Lapid?

   What sort of government are Lapid and Bennett forming?
   The easiest way to figure out which side is telling the truth would be to read the coalition agreements signed by the parties set to join the Lapid-Bennett government. Op-ed.

   Caroline Glick
   ???? ????
   (JNS) The storm of controversy now engulfing Israel revolves around one question. What sort of government do Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett intend to swear in?

   According to Lapid, Bennett and their media chorus, Israel is about to get a “unity government.” Once it is formed, all will be sweetness and light. The political fights that have afflicted us will fade away as the nation undergoes a collective therapy session.

   The other side—the political right—insists that the two men are forming a leftist government that is willing to sacrifice Zionism to achieve their highest goal: ousting Benjamin Netanyahu from the Prime Minister’s Office.

   The easiest way to figure out which side is telling the truth would be to read the coalition agreements signed by the parties set to join the Lapid-Bennett government. Those agreements would tell us what Lapid and Bennett have promised to do in their “unity” government. Unfortunately, Lapid and Bennett refuse to publish the contents of those agreements until after their government is sworn in.

   Last Friday night, journalist Sharon Gal reported on Channel 13 News how the Islamist Ra’am Party is presenting the agreement they signed to its voters in Arabic. In its written statements and in television interviews on Arabic-language channels by Ra’am Knesset members, the Islamist party claims that Lapid and Bennett agreed that their “unity” government will end enforcement of building and zoning laws in Arab-Israeli villages and cities. Orders to destroy illegal structures will be frozen. Fines for illegal buildings will be canceled.

   According to Ra’am, Bennett and Lapid have agreed to grant effective autonomy to the Bedouin in the Negev. Over the past 15 years, Bedouin have illegally seized massive swaths of state lands and built illegal settlements on them. Ra’am claims that Lapid and Bennett agreed to freeze the so-called Kaminitz Law, which empowers state authorities to reassert the Israel Land Authority’s control over seized lands through, among other things, the destruction of illegal construction.

   So as far as Ra’am is concerned, the political right’s assessment of the Lapid-Bennett government is accurate. Lapid and Bennett’s government will jettison Zionism.

   If they were forming a unity government, last week Yamina MK Ayelet Shaked wouldn’t have felt it necessary to lock Orbach in a room in the Knesset and ban him from speaking to anyone who opposes what she and Bennett are doing with Lapid and the rest of their coalition partners.
   Lapid and Bennett’s refusal to deny Ra’am’s claims, or reveal the actual agreements, prevents the public from checking the veracity of Ra’am’s assertions while lending them credence.

   Beyond hiding information from the public about what they have agreed to do once in power, Lapid, Bennett and their friends in the media and the permanent bureaucracy are also working hard to silence their critics.

   Over the weekend, in a gross overstep of his powers, Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) Director Nadav Argaman placed his thumb on the scales on behalf of Lapid-Bennett and their controversial government. Resonating leftist propaganda that delegitimizes all criticism of leftist policies from the right as “incitement,” Argaman released a statement Saturday where he insisted, “the incendiary discourse [around the Lapid-Bennett governing coalition] is liable to lead to physical harm.”

   For more than a year, leftist activists and leaders have been calling openly for Netanyahu and his family to die. Repeated death threats against the Netanyahu family have been made publicly by leftist activists. Despite repeated pleadings from the Netanyahus and their supporters, Argaman has refused to issue a statement against the mass incitement from the left.

   Likewise, for the past decade and a half, Israeli Arab politicians and religious leaders have issued a steady stream of incendiary and often openly anti-Semitic statements rejecting Israel’s right to exist and demonizing its people. Ahead of the Arab Israeli pogroms in mixed Jewish-Arab cities countrywide last month, those statements escalated. But Argaman never had anything to say about any of it.

   So the first time the security chief decided to issue a warning about political violence is now, at the height of a heated and completely legitimate public debate around the formation of a government dominated by leftist parties that will not reveal whether or not it has pledged to effectively end Israeli sovereignty over Israel’s non-Jewish citizens and cede the Negev to irredentist Bedouin who openly seek the destruction of the state and are aligned with extreme Islamist elements.

   If Lapid and Bennett were really forming a unity government, their supporters on Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be banning right-wing voices or censoring and banning right-wing opinion pieces. And yet, since last week, Facebook and Twitter have banned information about a scheduled protest outside the home of Yamina Knesset member Nir Orbach. They also suspended the accounts of Netanyahu’s son Yair Netanyahu and several other well-known right-wing writers and activists. Whatsapp banned the accounts of an entire community of right-wing political activists.

   If they were forming a unity government, last week Yamina MK Ayelet Shaked wouldn’t have felt it necessary to lock Orbach in a room in the Knesset and ban him from speaking to anyone who opposes what she and Bennett are doing with Lapid and the rest of their coalition partners.

   If this were a unity government, we could reasonably expect that Bennett and Lapid would eagerly put all their agreements on the table and let the public read them. And we could expect the multitudes to rush to join and support their great Zionist effort to restore tranquility, happiness, sweetness and light to the people of Israel.

   Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.