Yisrael Beiteinu party chairman Avigdor Liberman called today (Monday) at a meeting of his party faction for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to resign and admit that he was responsible for the start of the war Israel is fighting.
Liberman compared Netanyahu to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was still in his position when WWII began. “On September 1, 1939, WWII broke out and then the Prime Minister of England, Chamberlain, who for years tried to contain the demands, claims, and aggression of Nazi Germany, tried to reach a model of coexistence with them, understood the preconception collapsed, admitted his mistake, and then handed over management and the premiership to Churchill.”
According to him, “Netanyahu is apparently much less than Chamberlain and is therefore unwilling to hand the premiership to anyone, isn’t willing to admit he made a mistake and that his preconception collapsed, and since then we’ve seen unending efforts to pass the responsibility onto someone else.”
“The effort to pass responsibility onto others – Netanyahu’s march of folly”
Liberman noted Netanyahu’s efforts to attribute responsibility to others and the excuses that there wasn’t anything going on when the war started. “We remember immediately when the war started – the unexplained statement, the Prime Minister’s military secretary announcing the start of the war at 6:29. Then the tweet in the middle of the night accusing the defense establishment, and yesterday the peak of Netanyahu’s folly where he accused the reservists and the protesters because of whom Yahya Sinwar decided to launch a war against Israel.”
“All the attempts to pass on responsibility and blame to others is a march of folly, serious and deliberate harm who fought first and foremost to stop a blatant power grab of the Supreme Court and the Central Elections Committee and are now fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This accusation harms the security of the State of Israel.”
“Regarding the question of responsibility, there is no question here, Netanyahu defined it better than anyone, in testifying at the Winograd Committee and speaking at the Knesset where he spoke of the role of the Prime Minister in war, on his responsibility for national security in routine times and his demand that Olmert resign after the Second Lebanon War.”
“Even the absurd situation of today that we are still in the old preconception trying to contain everything that’s happening in the north, the daily provocations. Just yesterday a citizen was killed at kibbutz Yiftach. We saw the Grad missiles on Kiryat Shmonah. Two hundreds thousand Jews became refugees in their lands and wander from place to place because the government can’t arrange payment to hotels.”
“And therefore I say again: we need to change the preconception. It cannot be that we are only responding. We cannot contain the provocation of Hezbollah in the north. We need to end the war where we throw all the terrorists beyond the Litani in accordance with Resolution 1701. And I hope no-one intends to contain the fire of the Houthis towards Israel.”
“And those who really want to find the real reason for the start of the war, it’s ten days before that when 12 days of provocations on the fence, all the launches of fire balloons, the fires, and all of Netanyahu’s preconception of containing.”
“12 days that no-one – not the Prime Minister, Defense Minister, no minister bothered to pick up the phone to the heads of councils in the Perimeter. And the ultimate result of the wild behavior was containment and surrender to terror.”
“I want to remind how this wild behavior ended in the strangest ending, meaning surrender to terrorism, meaning to increase the number of Gazan workers entering Israel from 18,000 to 30,000 and increasing the Qatari monthly transfer of money from $10 million to $17 million. That was the ending.”
Therefore, there is a defeatist policy which led to the start of the war, and the responsibility is entirely on Netanyahu, first and foremost on him, on his defeatism, on his mistaken preconception, on the unwillingness to take responsibility and trying to blame others.”
“This is a political approach, it’s all political score-settling. They asked me why I don’t join the government – because Netanyahu refuses to include Avigdor Liberman in the war cabinet. I will not join to be a minister without portfolio. I am willing to carry the stretcher and take responsibility only if I am in the center of decision making. But if they are not willing to let me in because of my other view, Netanyahu even today is unwilling to accept someone with an entirely different preconception and unfortunately even today that defeatist preconception continues to dominate the war cabinet.”