New Right leader Naftali Bennett says Prime Minister Netanyahu’s last-minute campaign to boost support for his Likud part ahead of Tuesday’s elections could “wipe out” other right-wing factions.
In a video, Bennett says polling data he has seen shows that right-wing and religious parties will comfortably win a majority of Knesset seats, positioning Netanyahu to again form a government.
“But he’s making a gevalt and the gevalt is succeeding toward the small right-wing parties and like a tsunami is threatening to wipe out a not insignificant number of right-wing parties,” says Bennett, using a Yiddish term meaning “woe is me” to describe last-ditch campaign bids.
Bennett, who is education minister, says he has “no other explanation” for this approach except to presume that Netanyahu wants to form a government with centrist challenger Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party.
Netanyahu has ruled out teaming up with Gantz after elections in a number of recent interviews and has said he would include all right-wing parties in a government he heads.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, left, attend the weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, August 30, 2016. (Abir Sultan/Pool/via AP/File)
Discover Israel's most beloved poet
She died more than four decades ago, but Leah Goldberg remains a magnetic and enigmatic figure: Israel’s most beloved poet, a powerful woman who lived with her mother and never married, who reinvented herself from the ashes of World War I through her magical writing.
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