Gabi Ashkenazi: Coalition deal is ‘right thing to do’; Ya’alon: Dishrags

MK Gabi Ashkenazi of the Blue and White party says the coalition deal with the Likud is “the right thing to do.”

Asked if he is “satisfied” with the deal on a Channel 12 interview, Ashkenazi responds: “It’s not about being satisfied, it’s about doing the right thing.”

“I am convinced that – given the reality – it was the right things to do,” he says. Coalitions deals have a price, he explains.

“A responsible leadership cannot ignore the reality,” he goes on. “We said we wouldn’t sit alongside Netanyahu but we didn’t get the mandate to replace him.”

Ashkenazi understands “the disappointment” of the party’s voters but says he hopes “to convince them that this was the right decision.

Pushed on clauses of the deal that aim to protect Netanyahu from High Court intervention to bar him as prime minister or “alternate” prime minister because of the indictments against him, Ashkenazi says “there is nothing in the deal to circumvent the High Court.”

He says Blue and White will not fill all of the numerous ministries promised to it in the deal — which provides for a government of 32 ministers, rising to 36 — and won’t take all the promised deputy ministries either. (The deal provides for 16 deputy ministers in all.) He says Gantz has made clear he does not want the official residence promised to the alternate prime minister.

Asked about his former ally Yair Lapid’s allegations that Gantz, Ashkenazi and their colleagues betrayed their voters, and surrendered to Netanyahu and to ultra-Orthodox coercion, he says he respects Lapid and won’t get dragged into an exchange of allegations with him.

In a Channel 13 interview, Moshe Ya’alon, another former colleague of Gantz and Ashkenazi, says the Blue and White leaders “were reduced to dishrags, I’m sorry to say,” in the coalition negotiations with Netanyahu.