Speaking to Channel 12, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett says he will not have the Joint List in his coalition, insists he is not angry with Idit Silman for quitting and depriving his government of its majority, and claims the coalition will continue to function effectively.
He savages former PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, saying that “Bibi-ism is screaming all day against the left, and doing nothing, and in practice capitulating to the enemy.”
Asked about the terror wave Israel is confronting, Bennett says the IDF, police, and security agencies are tackling terrorism “at its source,” wherever that is, be it “Jenin or Yabad” in the West Bank where two terrorists who killed Israelis in Tel Aviv and Bnei Brak came from, “or Syria or Iran.”
“I can’t predict” how long the terror wave will last, “but we will win,” he says.
Asked about his previous criticisms of past governments, he says they “neglected” the security barrier and allowed it to fall into disrepair, and this is now being corrected.
He says he’s following “a carrot and stick” policy, not to harm those who “don’t want to harm us” — hence the permissions for those Palestinians who want to work in Israel.
He accuses PA President Mahmoud Abbas of “playing a double game, … for years and now,” by “encouraging terrorism, including through the education system, and paying terrorists.”
“That’s why I won’t meet with him,” he says.
Bennett says that after years of neglect, Israel is now tackling rampant crime in the Arab community, where there are a quarter of a million illegal weapons.
He says he is a true right-winger — and, sniping at Netanyahu, says to be “truly right-wing means stopping the distribution of suitcases of cash in Gaza,” as he has done, and “hitting back at Gaza when there is a single arson balloon.”
Asked when there will be elections, he says: “We don’t need elections now and there won’t be elections now.”
A return to the previous political “paralysis would be a disaster,” he says.
On Silman’s resignation, he says that Bezalel Smotrich and Benjamin Netanyahu tricked her “with empty promises… that won’t be honored.”
“We’ve stabilized [the coalition],” he says. “What Idit Silman went through in the past 10 months, nobody went through in the history of the state.”
He says she told him in tears at his home that Netanyahu’s and Smotrich’s people screamed unmentionable things at her children through megaphones, and that her husband Shmulik told him that they called his place of work and threatened him that he would be fired if she didn’t quit the coalition.
“It’s very hard not to break in a situation like that,” he says.
He says she had told him often that it was possible to work together in their diverse coalition. “I understand what she went through,” but “the response to extortion is not to run into the arms of those who are killing you.”
“The door is obviously open” for her to return, he says, and “it is clear to me that, in her heart, she greatly believes” in the possibility and value of cooperation within the diverse coalition.
He calls the remaining members of his Yamina party “heroes” for resisting the pressure to bring down the government.
Netanyahu’s only intention, he says, is to “improve the conditions for his plea bargain” in his corruption trial.
He denies that Silman’s resignation means she does not trust him or his leadership, reiterating that “the brutality” of the pressure on her is what broke her.
“They called her children’s Bnei Akiva leaders and told them to boot the kids out of Bnei Akiva,” he says.
Asked how the government can function with only 60 seats in the 120-member Knesset, he says the government can and is doing a great deal, but acknowledges that it will be hard to pass “controversial laws” and says “there’s a Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ayman Odeh partnership” that will vote even against laws backed by the right.
Odeh and the Joint List “are absolutely not” legitimate political partners, he says.
Odeh’s comments yesterday, urging Arab Israelis to quit the police and IDF “and revolt against the State of Israel, in my view, are illegal and shameful.”
He says he is proud of those Israeli Arabs who serve, and loves them, and cites Arab police officer Amir Khoury’s heroism in giving his life in the firefight that stopped the Bnei Brak terrorist.
“The Joint List are not and will be part of the coalition,” he says.
The only partnership with the Joint List, he says, is that maintained by Netanyahu and Smotrich.
By contrast, Bennett says, his coalition includes the Arab party Ra’am, whose leader Mansour Abbas “recognizes Israel as a Jewish state” and wants to heal Israeli rifts, and help fight crime in the Arab sector.
Asked again if he is truly a man of the right, he insists he is, and takes pains to use the words “Judea and Samaria” to describe the disputed territories, rather than “West Bank,” which he had said recently.
“A man of the right is one who blows up Hamas over a single [arson] balloon,” he says again — not one who tolerates thousands of rockets “including on Jerusalem and says they were fired because of an electoral fault.”
He says that Netanyahu had agreed to the US opening a consulate for the Palestinians “in Abu Dis,” inside Jerusalem (“Google it,” he tells Channel 13 when making the same exact comment), but that when he met US President Joe Biden, he told him, “I greatly respect you, but Jerusalem is the capital of only one country and that’s the State of Israel.”
He says that as a man of the right, he has moved to double the population of the Golan, and approve new communities for Jews in the Negev.
“To be right-wing is not Bibi-ism,” Bennett says. “Bibi-ism is screaming all day against the left, and doing nothing, and in practice capitulating to the enemy. What is right wing? It’s standing strong, and [ensuring] the unity of the people.”
