Steinitz: Lapid ‘pompous,’ Netanyahu ‘showed weakness’

Former finance minister Yuval Steinitz has issued a withering indictment of his successor, Yair Lapid, in the aftermath of a confrontation that saw Steinitz removed from a cabinet meeting by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the behest of Lapid. Steinitz currently serves as minister of international relations and strategic affairs, a far cry from his lofty position in Netanyahu’s previous cabinet.

“Lapid is pompous and arrogant,” Steinitz said in an interview Saturday with Channel 2’s Meet the Press, two weeks after the incident in question. “The episode was unnecessary and embarrassing. This man [Lapid] has been serving as a minister for all of three months. He enters the inner sanctum — the security cabinet — without having been part of the previous government and with no knowledge of how things work. He behaves like a person who’s entitled to everything.”

An ongoing spat between the two men came to a head during a July 20  meeting of the security cabinet, Netanyahu’s forum of senior ministers, that addressed cuts to the defense budget. Steinitz, as the previous finance minister, was invited to the meeting to give his opinion despite the fact that he’s no longer a member of the security cabinet.

However, the meeting also dealt with the peace process, a topic whose details non-member ministers are not privy to. When the diplomatic issue came up, Lapid pointed out that Steinitz was no longer a regular member of the security cabinet and should therefore leave the room, which Steinitz refused to do.

Eventually, Lapid appealed to Netanyahu, who capitulated. “Yuval, please leave and in an hour I’ll call you back for the second meeting,” the prime minister reportedly said.

According to Channel 2, an exasperated Steinitz got up and left in a huff.  “What are they doing to me?” he muttered under his breath. “How can they treat me like this?”

On Saturday Steinitz also reserved some criticism for Netanyahu.

“I don’t absolve the prime minister [of responsibility],” he said. “He should have behaved differently. He showed weakness and made a mistake in judgement. His comportment should make clear who’s boss.”

The confrontation at the security cabinet meeting was part of an ongoing conflict between Lapid and Steinitz regarding responsibility for the state of the economy.

The government is aiming to rein in its burgeoning debt by enacting a series of deep cuts in the 2013-14 budget. When Lapid took over as finance minister in March he lamented the “monstrous deficit” facing the country, which he attributed to “wasting money we didn’t have and making commitments we shouldn’t have made.”

Steinitz responded by saying that the budgetary woes were caused by the social protesters who in 2011 demanded affordable housing and other government spending to curb poverty and reduce the cost of living. The social protest movement was seen as having generated a large portion of the votes that made Lapid’s Yesh Atid party the second-largest faction in the Knesset after the elections of January 2012.

During his Meet the Press interview, Steinitz said Lapid had failed to internalize the advice he had imparted to him when handing over the keys to the Treasury.

“I told Lapid there were two essential things for the finance minister to remember,” he said. “The first [is] to forget about popularity and to stop chasing after the media and [writing] Facebook status updates. The second is to study [the material] and not to make hasty decisions.”

Steinitz is considered a protégé of Netanyahu and is said to be favored by the prime minister’s influential wife, Sara. However, in the recent Likud primaries he placed near the bottom of the party’s list, which meant that Netanyahu couldn’t give him a senior ministership and had to leave him out of the security cabinet.

Stuart Winer contributed to this report.