Education Minister and Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett on Saturday night elaborated on his demands to optimize the Security Cabinet as a precondition for the Jewish Home to support the expansion of the coalition.
Writing on Facebook, Bennett recalled leaving the world of high-tech and entering politics following the Second Lebanon War, where he saw as a field commander “what happens when the country’s leaders send soldiers into battle without realizing what they are doing.”
“I didn’t need job and didn’t need money. I simply vowed never to let what I saw happen again,” he stressed.
His demand, explained Bennett, is that “the commander of the army, i.e. the Security Cabinet, the body which makes fateful decisions of life and death, cease to be blind. And right now it is blind.”
“We demand that the members of the Cabinet are trained. That they receive material before meetings. That they go down to the field to see for themselves. That they receive a complete picture, not a censored one, of all fronts. That we have a secretary to come to us once or twice a week and update us on all that is needed. Unfortunately, that does not happen today,” Bennett wrote, adding that members of the Cabinet have been consistently not been privy to essential information.
“For example, in the two years prior to Protective Edge, members of the Cabinet were not updated at all that there are terror tunnels leading into Israel(!), did not know about the enemy’s plans, and so in the moment of truth Operation Protective Edge took very long and continued for over 51(!) days instead of a week. A quick and determined operation may have saved lives,” he said.
“This situation could have ended with a terrible terrorist attack on the south,” wrote Bennett, who said he received the information on Hamas’s tunnels himself by going down to the field and speaking to IDF commanders. “The same thing happened in the Second Lebanon War. There, too, the Cabinet was not updated about what was happening, but needed to make decisions which turned out to be unnecessary.”
Bennett noted that he has been asking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to fix the flaws in the Cabinet for two and a half years, but there has been no progress on the part of Netanyahu.
“Even last Sunday I spoke to him quietly. On Monday too. Nothing. Just as you must not cover the eyes of a bus driver, so you must not cover the eyes of the Cabinet. Both endanger human life,” he wrote.
“Therefore, our demand remains. I want to respect the Prime Minister, as long as we correct the Cabinet already. No ministerial portfolios, no jobs, no budgets. Our soldiers’ lives. Human life is priceless,” concluded Bennett.
On Friday, Netanyahu announced changes to the intelligence sharing process in the Security Cabinet, in a move to placate Bennett’s demands.
The Prime Minister’s office announced the formation of a committee “to recommend ways to update and transfer data to the cabinet ministers, and their preparations for meetings while upholding the security of the information.”
But Bennett’s party immediately rejected the move as “spin,” saying it fell far short of the meaningful changes he was calling for.
“Neutralizing the cabinet endangers lives in a clear and imminent manner, and no spin will cover this up,” the Jewish Home party shot back in a statement.
Bennett had received support for his calls from the opposition as well, in the form of his one-time ally, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid.
“Bennett is right. As a condition to expand the coalition he is demanding only one thing: a deep repair in the work of the Security Cabinet. As someone who sat with him in the Cabinet, I can testify that the current situation is not reasonable,” Lapid wrote on Facebook.
