Shaked vs. Lapid: ‘Anti-Netanyahu incitement at Rabin memorial crossed the line’

“Upon hearing the speeches yesterday, I cringed,” Shaked wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday morning.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Interior Minister and Yamina party number two Ayelet Shaked blasted her fellow coalition members for using a memorial event for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as an opportunity to criticize the most recent premier, Benjamin Netanyahu.

During their speeches at the Rabin commemoration on Monday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz made speeches which appeared to place the blame for Rabin’s slaying on Netanyahu and praising the so-called change government’s rise to power as a victory over tyranny.

“Upon hearing the speeches yesterday, I cringed,” Shaked wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday morning.

“Labeling a large portion of the voting public as opponents and assassins of democracy is a terrible injustice…Such labeling excludes half of the [population] from the democratic arena- it is not [about] the preservation of democracy but contempt for it.”

The Likud party, which is headed by Netanyahu, earned nearly twice as many votes as the next largest party, Yesh Atid.

“[Rabin assassin] Yigal Amir’s ideological heirs are today serving in Israel’s Knesset. Had we not performed the miracle of the ‘change government,’ they would be ministers in the government,” Lapid said during his speech at the memorial.

Horowitz said Netanyahu’s decision to skip the event was a “continuation of the campaign of incitement and distortion of history, and an attempt to disengage from responsibility.”

Yonatan Ben Artzi, Rabin’s grandson, praised the new ruling coalition and said that “after dark years of fear and [political] paralysis, Israel has won. In the face of a culture of tyranny, the people won. This morning, 26 years after the terrible night, I can say that the mourning period is over.”

Shaked called the comments from her coalition partners “wild incitement” and said that while she believes in political debate, the remarks made on Monday “crossed the line.”

She also referenced what she called a “wrongly worded” tweet made by her fellow Yamina party member Shirley Pinto, which appeared to blame Netanyahu for Rabin’s slaying.

Shaked said she was glad Pinto deleted the tweet, after Netanyahu had reposted it to demonstrate the level of vitriol directed at him in the aftermath of the Rabin event.