Smotrich claims Yair Golan would reverse all his moves to advance settlements; Golan pans Lebanon security zone

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and The Democrats party chairman Yair Golan trade insults in the Knesset, accusing each other of harming core Israeli interests.

Addressing reporters ahead of his Religious Zionism party’s weekly faction meeting in the Knesset, Smotrich accuses Golan of seeking to close the prominent Eli pre-military academy while also working on a plan to reverse “everything we have done” in advancing settlements in the West Bank.

“Today, I am giving a clear and unequivocal warning to the right-wing public in Israel: Yair Golan will be the defense minister in a [Gadi] Eisenkot government,” Smotrich claims. “The enterprise of the Religious Zionist pre-military academies (mechinot) and Hesder yeshivas will only be the beginning. Senior European Union officials, along with foreign elements funded by massive capital, have conspired with senior opposition figures, and together they are weaving a plan to dismantle everything we have achieved in the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria.”

For his part, Golan asserts that “the current Israeli government has no idea how to end wars,” telling reporters ahead of his own faction meeting that “when the Netanyahu-Smotrich-Deri government insists on maintaining a bloody security strip in the Lebanese mud without any political-security move that would translate the achievement into long-term security, our soldiers are the ones paying with their lives.”