Yair Netanyahu warns toppling dad’s government will help Left rise
“My father warned that the [Gaza] Strip will turn into a Hamas state. The Left mocked him and called him the national fear-monger."
By LAHAV HARKOVYair Netanyahu(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair Netanyahu, made an impassioned plea against toppling the coalition in a Facebook post Thursday afternoon, when an early election seemed like an inevitability.“My right-wing brothers,” Netanyahu wrote, “history always repeats itself!”The prime minister’s son recounted that in 1992, then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition fell apart after the Tehiya party withdrew, because Shamir had attended the Madrid Conference at which the Palestinians were present. Yitzhak Rabin and Labor won the subsequent election, and Rabin signed the Oslo Accords.“Before Oslo, the residents of Ashkelon would go shopping in Gaza on Saturdays. There weren’t suicide bombings and the Palestinians didn’t have missiles,” Netanyahu wrote.Netanyahu, 26, called Rabin, as well as former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon “generals” – which is not an actual rank in the IDF – while pointing to weaknesses in their defense policies, such as Barak withdrawing the IDF from southern Lebanon and the disengagement from Gaza under Sharon.“My father warned that the [Gaza] Strip will turn into a Hamas state and that the few missiles they had shot at the towns in Gush Katif [in Gaza] will turn into many missiles sent to Ashkelon, Ashdod and Beersheba. The Left mocked him and called him the national fear-monger. Now my right-wing friends, they are cynically trying to harness their justified frustration and to crown a left-wing government, without you understanding,” Netanyahu warned.He also spoke out against a Palestinian state in the West Bank, which he said would be a “terror state 5km from Ben-Gurion airport and 15km from Tel Aviv.” Such a state would cause more damage because it is larger and has mountains overlooking Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean shoreline.“Giving the Left another chance to do what they did in Oslo, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement, will be an existential danger to Israel," he concluded.
