(January 31, 2023 / JNS) Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet vowed on Monday to return to politics, evaluating himself to Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu, each of whom recaptured the premiership after prolonged intervals out of workplace.
“In Israel, we can be recycled. It never ends. Rabin was prime minister from ’74 to ’77 and came back. Bibi [Netanyahu] was prime minister from ’96 to ’99 and he’s back. So I’ll be back,” mentioned Bennett.
He was talking on the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center in Manhattan at an occasion co-hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York.
Addressing the animus being directed by some circles on the present authorities, together with over plans to reform the judiciary, Bennett implored U.S. Jewry to not flip its collective again on Israel.
“I urge you, don’t give up on Israel, even if we’re going through a midlife crisis,” he mentioned. “We will overcome this, as a result of the vast majority of the general public desires a Jewish and democratic Israel, desires Judaism, doesn’t need coercion.
“When your family member goes through a crisis, you don’t give up on them—quite the contrary, you embrace them, you help them through this period,” added Bennett.
Bennett earlier this month criticized the proposed authorized reforms by the Netanyahu-led authorities, tweeting: “It’s no secret that I believe that for generations, the judicial system has assumed excessive powers, and blocked any attempt at correction. I believe that certain changes are needed in the judicial system and in recent years we have even promoted some of them. But you don’t correct a historical distortion with another distortion.”
For his half, Netanyahu has repeatedly defended the plan to overhaul the authorized system and known as on opposition leaders to cease threatening “civil war” and talking of “the destruction of the state.”
“The reform will be launched, and just as we weren’t daunted in the past from the attacks by the left and the media, we will not be daunted this time either,” said Netanyahu. “The discussion in most media channels around the legal reforms is intentionally superficial and one-sided. Everything is designed to foment false panic about the ‘end of democracy.’”
Bennett introduced his resignation shortly after the decisive victory of Netanyahu’s right-religious bloc within the Nov. 1 nationwide election, and knowledgeable then-Prime Minister Yair Lapid of his determination.
Bennett in June 2021 defected from the appropriate so as to lead a coalition as a part of a power-sharing settlement with Lapid.
In a Sept. 14 put up, which he pinned to the highest of his Facebook and Twitter accounts, Bennett described his determination to abandon his right-wing base and be a part of forces with center-left, far-left and Islamist events because the “best and most Zionist decision in my life.”
