Yesh Atid MKs pan Netanyahu's 'cowardly' speech

Opposition leader calls for unity among left-wing and centrist parties to defeat Likud in upcoming elections

Members of the Yesh Atid party tendered their resignations from the cabinet and lashed out at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday night, following the prime minister’s firing of party leader Yair Lapid and Hatnua party leader Tzipi Livni from their ministerial posts.

Netanyahu spoke to the press following his dismissal of the finance and justice ministers, lambasting them for criticizing his government from within and attempting a “putsch,” and announced new elections.

The prime minister is reportedly pushing for elections on March 10, 17 or 24 of next year.

The exchanges between Netanyahu, Lapid and Livni have become increasingly savage in recent days.

Outgoing Science Minister Yaakov Peri called Netanyahu’s speech “timid, cowardly and borderline hysterical,” while outgoing Education Minister Shai Piron said the prime minister’s address was “cowardly and bad.”

“We have no choice but to join the finance minister and justice minister because there’s no point in a government that rules aggressively, a government without a future or hope,” Piron said in tendering his resignation. “I hoped, until last night, that things would change, but there was someone who wanted it differently.”

Livni — on Twitter — dismissed Netanyahu’s claim that she and Lapid attempted to oust him from power, saying there “was no putsch. But if there was, we wouldn’t have sweated through a putsch like he did.”

Opposition party leaders also took the opportunity to knock Netanyahu. Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog — in a Facebook post Tuesday evening — called the impending elections “fateful.”

“Six bad years of Netanyahu are over,” Herzog said. “Israelis deserve a different leadership: better, more united, more socially conscious, and more responsible. The Zionist bloc is expected to join hands under the leadership of the Labor Party and to restore hope.” He said the elections would pit Likud against Labor.

Meretz party leader Zahava Gal-on attacked Livni, Piron and Herzog for bashing Netanyahu, while “in the same breath refusing to commit not to sit in his government.

“No one here is innocent — they’re playing the same game of crawling into a coalition that we saw in the last elections and brought about the current sinister government,” she wrote in a statement posted to Facebook. Gal-on vowed that her left-wing party wouldn’t join a Netanyahu government.