‘Crackup of the right worse than elections,’ Israeli minister Smotrich warns

Smotrich rejected Bennett’s call for a unity government at any price. 

By World Israel News Staff

“The crackup of the right would be an irresponsible folly,” Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich tweeted on Sunday.

He said “it would lead to to the establishment of an Oslo government, which, the last time it was established, led to serious disasters. This election is bad, but the dissolution of the right and the establishment of an Oslo government are much worse.”

Blaming Blue and White leader Benny Gantz for the current impasse, he said, “The bloc’s leaders should internalize this: The barrier to establishing a unity government is Gantz’s insistence on disqualifying Netanyahu rather than unity on the right.”

Smotrich made his comments in response to remarks by New Right leader Naftali Bennett on Saturday night that he would free Netanyahu of all obligations the latter had made toward his party if it would help bring about a unity government with Gantz.

“I would say we’re in an event of national emergency,” Bennett said on Channel 12’s Meet the Press program.

“I am ready to do anything to help Netanyahu and Gantz – establish even a national emergency government,” Bennett said. “If I am a barrier to forming a government, I release Netanyahu from any commitment to me. The main thing is that a government will emerge.”

Although Bennett is a right-wing leader, there appears to be a split on the right about what is best – a unity government or opposition.

Last week, weekly newspaper Makor Rishon reported on a “special emergency meeting” held by a group of representatives of right-wing nationalists who are members of the Likud party.

“The national camp is afraid of what’s going to happen,” Alon Karkovsky, one of the meeting’s initiators and a resident of the settlement of Levana near Mount Hermon, told the paper.

“A unity government is the biggest fear. I would prefer to go to the opposition than a quiet unity government,” he said.

Israeli elections 2019Naftali Bennett