Benny Gantz visits the Kfar Etzion Field School.. (photo credit: Courtesy)
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Former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz, who polls predict will lead the Center-Left camp in the April 9 election, visited the Kfar Etzion Field School over the Green Line on Monday and spoke about the need for Israel to keep the Gush Etzion bloc forever.
The Field School is located in the center of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion in the Judean Hills, some 20 km. south of Jerusalem. He wrote that the visit made a significant impression on him.
“The bloc was a strategic, spiritual and settlement asset and will remain so forever,” Gantz wrote in the visitor’s book of the field school.
In Gantz’s first political speech on January 29, he explained his views on settlements:
“We will strengthen the settlement blocs and the Golan Heights, from which we will never retreat,” Gantz said in the speech. “The Jordan Valley will remain our eastern security border. We will maintain security in the entire Land of Israel, but we will not allow the millions of Palestinians living beyond the separation fence to endanger our security and our identity as a Jewish state.”
He also said that united Jerusalem “will be built, will grow – and will remain forever the capital of the Jewish people and the capital of the State of Israel.”
Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg criticized Gantz for his visit to Gush Etzion.
“When there is no Right and no Left, it is the Right that dictates the tone,” Zandberg said. “Israel’s top strategic asset is not settlements but achieving a peace agreement. Those who want to reach an agreement in which Israel keeps the blocs must especially speak clearly about evacuating settlements instead of offering empty slogans.”
Gantz is the chairman of the Israel Resilience Party. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gantz are neck and neck in a recent survey by pollsters Mano Geva and Mina Tzemach for Channel 12, with 36% saying that Netanyahu is most fit to serve as prime minister while 35% preferred Gantz.
The polls found that Gantz’s Israel Resilience Party, which had previously peaked at 15 seats, would win as many as 24 seats if the April 9 election were to be held now – and that the gap with Netanyahu’s Likud was as little as six seats.
Former Zionist Union head and current Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog, along with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid, who headed the Zionist camp in the 2015 election, also visited Gush Etzion during the campaign and spoke there about the need to keep it forever. There is a community in Gush Etzion called Massuot Yitzhak that is named after Herzog’s grandfather, who was Israel’s chief rabbi.
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