The internal bickering in the Cabinet has brought Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon to the point of suggesting a creative solution aimed at calming tempers.
“We need to send this government on vacation. Send them out, urgently, before we have to institutionalize them, the whole government,” Kahlon told Army Radio this afternoon (Monday).
Minister Kahlon’s exasperated comments come against the backdrop of the ongoing verbal confrontation between Prime Minister Netanyahu and some Likud Ministers in one corner, and Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, both of Jewish Home, in the opposite corner.
After emotions flared at yesterdays Cabinet meeting the Likud released an official statement saying that “Bennett and Shaked are the darlings of the left, who are supporting their unrelenting efforts to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Likud’s leadership of the government.”
Jewish Home didn’t let that slide, and promptly returned fire this morning, employing the army term “firing in the Armored Personnel Carrier (APC),” (incidentally, on the same day the IDF revealed a new APC on wheels) an expression that means “behaving recklessly in a way which endangers one’s own colleagues and interests,” and applying it to Netanyahu, spelling out a litany of occasions when the Prime Minister has fallen short of living up to his right-wing bona fides, in their view.
“Netanyahu is once again ‘firing in the APC,'” said the Jewish Home statement, “just like he did when he voted for the disengagement from and demolition of Gush Katif, just like he did when he released the most terrorist in the country’s history, when he froze construction, when he capitulated to Hamas, when he declared his intention of establishing a Palestinian state in the speech in Bar-Ilan university, and when he decided to count the Yarmulkes of religious reporters in the media.
“The most pathetic part is that he fires in the APC when trying to bring [Labor MKs] Herzog, Shaffir, Michaeli, and Yossi Yonah into it,” the Jewish Home statement continued, “in the lead-up to elections he always makes sure to cozy up to the religious and right-wing sector, and then a minute after the elections are over he throws them away in contempt. The days of us being whipping boys are over.”
