Netanyahu slams Lapid’s UN speech: ‘Endangering’ Israel’s future

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu rails against Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly, charging that Lapid is “endangering” Israel’s future by renewing discussion of Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu says that “Lapid is bringing the Palestinians back to the forefront of the world stage and putting Israel right into the Palestinian pit,” in a video message released during Lapid’s remarks.

In recent years, Israeli leaders have largely distanced themselves from the two-state solution, even though Netanyahu himself called for a two-state solution at the UN in 2016.

Netanyahu has moved away from that line in recent years, and now takes credit for having “removed Palestinian statehood from the global agenda.”

Netanyahu’s comments come just 38 days from Israel’s November 1 election, after which Netanyahu hopes to have the numbers to cobble together a right-religious government.

His religious Zionist partners, as well as many of his party members, are staunchly pro-settlement and against relinquishing Israel’s claim on territories for an independent Palestinian state.

The Likud leader says that a Palestinian state would be a security threat, charging that Lapid “is going to give them a terrorist state in the heart of the country, a state that will threaten us all.”