Table Of Contents:
Blue and White Splits as Unity Deal with Likud Approaches: Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 26, 2020
Former Gantz Partners Blast him for ‘Selling Out’ to Netanyahu: Paul Shindman, World Israel News, Mar. 26, 2020
Netanyahu & Gantz Save Israel from a Political Nightmare: Avi Abelow, Caroline B. Glick, Israel UnWired, Mar. 26, 2020
America’s Largest Population of Holocaust Survivors Is Endangered by the Coronavirus as Crown Heights and Borough Park Shut Down: Tablet, Mar. 24, 2020
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Blue and White Splits as Unity Deal with Likud Approaches
Gil Hoffman
Jerusalem Post, Mar. 26, 2020
In a dramatic turn of events, the Blue and White Party, which served as the alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the March 2 election, broke up on Thursday after party head Benny Gantz decided to enter Netanyahu’s government.
The three parties that made up Blue and White – Gantz’s Israel Resilience, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem – all went in different directions. Israel Resilience is joining the government, Lapid will head the opposition and Telem will split up, with Ya’alon on the outside and divided.
Yesh Atid and Telem formally asked the Knesset to split off from Israel Resilience and keep the name Blue and White for the two parties together. Yesh Atid MKs wished their former colleagues good luck as they left the party’s WhatsApp group.
Gantz reached out to Lapid in a speech after getting elected Knesset speaker, in an effort to prevent the split.
“It has been my intention, and it is still my intention, to do everything possible to keep us together, and I urge all of my potential political partners to act in the same spirit,” he said. “This is not the time for in-fighting and mud-slinging. This is not the time for controversy and divisions. This is the time for responsible, committed, patriotic leadership.”
But Lapid and Ya’alon responded by fiercely attacking him in speeches in Tel Aviv.
“We formed Blue and White to offer an alternative to the Israeli people,” Lapid said. “The election results proved that Israel needed that alternative like we need air to breathe. We wanted to bring about change, to bring about hope, to start a new path. Benny Gantz decided today to break apart Blue and White and crawl into Netanyahu’s government. It’s a disappointing decision. What’s being formed today isn’t a unity government or an emergency government. It’s another Netanyahu government. Benny Gantz surrendered without a fight and crawled into Netanyahu’s government.”
Ya’alon accused Gantz of committing political suicide.
There will be a rotation in the Prime Minister’s Office between Netanyahu and Gantz. Netanyahu’s allies will start off as finance minister and Knesset speaker, with outgoing speaker Yuli Edelstein expected to return to the role. Gantz will reportedly serve as defense minister, MK Gabi Ashkenazi as foreign minister, and many other MKs from Israel Resilience will also be ministers. The sensitive Justice portfolio will also go to the party despite prior denials. Yamina Chairman Naftali Bennett is also a candidate to continue serving as defense minister or alternatively as finance minister.
The split happened after Gantz decided that he would be the candidate for interim speaker of the Knesset to facilitate progress in coalition talks with Likud. Appointing Gantz as speaker gave time for the talks to proceed.
The Likud objected to Blue and White MK Meir Cohen becoming Knesset speaker, because he is from Yesh Atid, which Likud knew would stay out of a national-unity government initially led by Netanyahu. Lapid had an agreement with Gantz that the speaker must come from his party. A meeting of the cockpit of leaders in Blue and White ended in what has been described as the worst-ever fight among the leaders. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Former Gantz Partners Blast him for ‘Selling Out’ to Netanyahu
Paul Shindman
World Israel News, Mar. 26, 2020
Bitter and combative, Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya’alon on Thursday slammed their former political partner, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz for announcing earlier in the day he would join a government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A few hours after Gantz shocked Israeli politics by agreeing to something he swore on multiple occasions he would never do – sit in a coalition government with Netanyahu as leader – Lapid and Ya’alon accused Gantz of selling out voters and “reward[ing] to criminality.”
“The Corona crisis does not permit or authorize us to abandon [our] values,” Lapid said Thursday evening. “We promised that we would not sit under a prime minister with three indictments [against him]. We promised that we would not sit in a coalition of extortionists and extremists. We said we would not allow Israeli democracy to be harmed.”
“Whoever crawls into such a government will not sell us that he is doing it for the good of the country,” Lapid said, saying there was only one mission facing the country – overcoming the coronavirus epidemic – and his party would work unceasingly from the opposition benches to help Israelis overcome the crisis.
“Benny Gantz decided today to break up Blue and White in order to crawl into the Netanyahu government,” said Lapid, whose Yesh Atid Party agreed to a merger with Gantz a year ago in a bid to force the long-serving Netanyahu from office.
“We ran together because Benny Gantz looked me in the eye and told me he would never sit in such an evil government. And I believed him,” Lapid said, adding that the one million Blue and White voters felt “betrayed” that their votes “were stolen” and handed over as a gift to Netanyahu.
Gantz’s right-hand man, Gabi Ashkenazi, will apparently become defense minister. Ashkenazi was Gantz’s predecessor as head of Israel’s armed forces and said the breakup of the Blue and White Party was necessary for the sake of the country.
“The country is in a time of national crisis, one of the most difficult we have known,” Ashkenazi tweeted. “A difficult crisis requires tough decisions. We are public servants; we have served the public all our lives. We could not oppose this at this point in time. At this moment Israeli citizens need a national emergency government. As always, even today – Israel before all.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Netanyahu & Gantz Save Israel from a Political Nightmare
Avi Abelow, Caroline B. Glick
Israel UnWired, Mar. 26, 2020
WATCH: Full Analysis by Caroline Glick
Prime Minister Netanyahu succeeded in convincing Blue & White leader Benny Gantz to join an emergency coalition government and stop the dangerous political plan Gantz had put into action; relying on the anti-Israel Joint Arab list, with the assistance of the Supreme Court in damaging Israel’s democratic system.
Caroline Glick has a fabulous short analysis of the breakup of Blue & White and Benny Gantz’s agreement to join a coalition with Netanyahu. For her full analysis see the full interview below.
I have been extremely critical of Benny Gantz and his Blue & White party in their evil plan to form a government with the support of the anti-Israel Joint Arab list at the same time as damaging Israel’s democracy, hand in hand with the judicial establishment by allowing them to usurp the powers of Israel’s legislative branch, the Knesset. He ran three election campaigns focused on one promise – to get rid of Netanyahu from the Israeli political scene, it was called the “anything but Bibi” coalition, and he was willing do anything to accomplish it, even partnering with anti-Israel forces.
Literally seconds before Gantz would have been unable to turn back from implementing that plan, Netanyahu succeeded in convincing him to stop it. Instead, Gantz made the first correct political decision of his short political career and decided to join up with Netanyahu in forming an emergency government so that the State of Israel can finally have a government to properly deal with the coronavirus that is the most pressing issue our country faces. It was a bold move that he must be given credit for, while at the same time not forgiven for the horrendous plan he was almost successful in implementing.
As a result of his decision to join an emergency government with Netanyahu, two of his leadership partners in Blue & White split off from him and instead are taking their seats and heading to the opposition. Israel has a huge challenge in dealing with the coronavirus and the crippled economy due to the pandemic. We finally have a government, under the leadership of Netanyahu to do just that. Glick also is optimistic that this new government will move forward and apply sovereignty in areas of Judea & Samaria together with the approval of the Trump administration.
Now that the dream of Israel’s left to get rid of Netanyahu is dead, I wouldn’t be surprised if the leftist media together with the judicial establishment now push the investigation into Gantz’s failed company & also push for the lifting of the censorship on the Ashkenazi/Harpaz recordings. The media and judicial establishment have been covering for those two from the beginning of the first election until today when they were the big white hope to take down Netanyahu. Now that Gantz and Ashkenazi have joined with Bibi, the media and judicial establishment might not hide that information anymore. Revenge can be ugly.
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America’s Largest Population of Holocaust Survivors Is Endangered by the Coronavirus as Crown Heights and Borough Park Shut Down
Tablet, Mar. 24, 2020
By last Wednesday afternoon the outer doors of 770 Eastern Parkway were locked, while the doors connecting the complex’s narrow lobby to the rambunctious communal shul for New York’s Chabad Hasidim were chained shut. The unthinkable was occurring. The Mitzvah Tanks sat idle on Kingston Avenue, Crown Heights’ typically lively ultra-Orthodox main street, which is now almost fully emptied of people. The mikvah and the Beit Din were closed, although in the latter case, “drop-off for shaalos can be done in the door slot as always,” per a posted notice. Pallets of paper towels and toilet paper crowded the entrance to nearby Empire Kosher, where the shoppers seemed every bit as fearful of one another—or, perhaps, every bit as wary of revealing their fears to one another—as the people in my local Walgreens a couple neighborhoods north. “You see,” said Dovid Margolin, an editor for Chabad.org and my guide around virus-era Crown Heights last week, “there are no old people here.”
The coronavirus pandemic is perhaps the first total event in human history. There have been other spells of worldwide pestilence and conflict, but this is the only one to occur during a time of instantaneous mass communication and high-speed global travel—and maybe the only one to occur during an era in which there is theoretically a species-wide agreement on the intrinsic value of human life.
And yet the pandemic inflicts miseries that are particular to each place it visits. On Wednesday at 770, there were maybe 15 young men standing around a long table stacked with religious texts. I began chatting with two chavruta partners who were sitting together next to the Eastern Parkway bike path, studying the section of the Shulchan Aruch about religious courts—the pages they might have otherwise been probing if their yeshiva had stayed open (all the religious schools in Crown Heights had suspended operations at noon the previous Friday). They, and the nearby group of 15, were all speaking Hebrew to one another. These were students who had no family in America, nothing to do, nowhere else to go. The resilience of the Crown Heights community, and of Orthodox communities in general, comes from their close-knit, multigenerational families, a ready-made support network when things take an unexpected turn for the surreal. These students only had each other.
Everywhere else in the neighborhood, a visitor could feel the presence of people hiding behind brick walls and closed doors. On Crown Street, someone blasted a recording of the Shema from a high balcony, followed by “Ouf Ghazal” or “Fly, Fledgeling,” a beloved secular Israeli folk song by the late Arik Einstein whose lyrics are an extended metaphor for a parents’ hopes and fears for their young in an unpredictable world. Maybe the listeners found the music heartening—but they were inside, invisible. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Netanyahu and Gantz Said Forming Unity Government; Blue and White Collapses: Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel , Mar. 26, 2020 — Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz is set to partner Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a unity government, serving initially as foreign minister but then taking over from Netanyahu as prime minister in September 2021, according to a reported deal taking shape amid immense political drama in Israel on Thursday afternoon.
Israel’s Coalition Crisis Deepens With High Court Ruling on Knesset Speakerz: Alex Traiman, JNS, Mar. 24, 2020 — Amid Israel’s aggressive attempts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, the country’s democratic system has been thrown into an unprecedented and multilayered crisis, now embroiling the executive, legislative and judicial branches of its government.
Gantz Together with Israel’s Supreme Court are Killing Israel’s Democracy: Avi Abelow, Israel Unwired, 25, 2020 — The ‘Blue and White’ party, which has the support of the mainstream media, academia, and the legal system, is currently pushing for changes that severely damages Israeli democracy, and it is highly doubtful whether the damage done can be repaired later.
Israel’s Lockdown Can be a Model for Britain: Melanie Phillips, Melaniephillips.com, Mar. 27, 2020 — For the past 12 days I have been under effective house arrest in Jerusalem.
How are Palestinians Coping with Coronavirus?: Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 26, 2020 — “I never imagined in my life that the day would come when I would see Palestinian policemen impose a curfew on a Palestinian village or town,” said Siham Rishmawi, 63, a Palestinian mother of four from Beit Sahur.
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This week’s French-language briefing is titled
Coronavirus: une pandémie d’ampleur biblique. Prise 2 (Mars 27,2020)
CIJR wishes our friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom! Stay healthy!