Yesh Atid MK urges opposition parties to set aside Palestinian issue for several years to focus on healing country

Yesh Atid MK Ram Ben Barak urges parties that oppose the current government to put aside their ideological differences regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to unite and focus on healing the country for several years.

“This will take two, three, four, five years… Only then should we deal with the ideological issues,” says Ben Barak, who lost the recent Yesh Atid primary to chairman Yair Lapid by 29 votes, in an interview with Channel 12.

This approach was the one adopted by the unity government Lapid helped lead with former prime minister Naftali Bennett.

But that coalition collapsed after just a year in June 2022, and lawmakers and analysts from both sides of the political spectrum have argued that one of the lessons of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot continue to be ignored or managed.