Likud, Yamina fight over who is right wing

The dispute between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz’s Blue and White on the 2021 state budget came no closer to resolution on Wednesday, despite an overture from Finance Minister Israel Katz.

Katz’s office announced that the Finance Ministry intends to pass the 2021 state budget in February, despite Gantz’s demand that the budget be presented in December.

“Finance Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have agreed to convene on Monday and present the proposed state budget for 2021, marking the first step in the process of approving it,” the Finance Ministry statement said. “After Netanyahu approves the budget’s outline, the Finance Ministry will begin the process of approving its finer details with the various government offices, including the Justice Ministry.”

Sources close to Gantz said they were unimpressed by Katz’s offer.

“We cannot wait for February, and there is no reason to wait until February,” a source close to Gantz said.

Gantz said in TV interviews on Tuesday that the budget dispute could easily be resolved. Katz’s offer was intended to call Gantz’s bluff and shift the blame to Blue and White if early elections are initiated.  

“The intention was not to humiliate Gantz,” a source in the Finance Ministry said. “The intention was to drag him into a compromise, make him think we are helping him and then humiliate him.”

Blue and White remained undecided on Wednesday about whether to disperse the Knesset and initiate an election. Yesh Atid mocked Blue and White officials for saying that they could propose their own bill to disperse the Knesset and pass it on Monday, before Yesh Atid’s bill is set to come to a vote next Wednesday.

Sources in Yesh Atid said Blue and White has proposed no such bill, and it is already too late to propose a bill that could come to a vote next week.

“Blue and White clearly has not learned how the Knesset works,” a Yesh Atid official said.   

Naftali Bennett’s Yamina has already decided to join every other party in the opposition in supporting Yesh Atid’s Knesset dispersal bill. Likud and Yamina accused each other of not being genuinely right-wing in an exchange of blows on Wednesday.

In an interview with the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) website Kikar Shabbat, Bennett said that Netanyahu and the haredi parties broke up the right-wing bloc when they left Yamina out of the current coalition.

The Likud released a four-second video of Bennett saying “there is no more right-wing bloc,” without providing the context. Netanyahu’s party accused Bennett of returning to the brief political bond he had with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid when they both entered the Knesset in 2013.

“The covenant of the brothers has returned on steroids,” a Likud spokesman said in a press release that accompanied the video. “Bennett is officially declaring that there is no right-wing bloc. Instead of leading a satellite party, Bennett should officially join Yesh Atid.

Yamina responded that it is Netanyahu who has a bond with Lapid, because both leaders have engaged in politics when they should have been focusing on fighting the coronavirus and healing the economy.

“As long as they cannot rise above politics and understand the challenge of the moment, neither deserves to be prime minister.

A bill sponsored by Yamina MK Bezalel Smotrich that would impose a cooling-off period for an attorney-general or state prosecutor before being appointed to the Supreme Court was easily defeated on Wednesday afternoon. Likud MKs boycotted the debate and the vote on the bill, prompting Smotrich to accuse the party of “not being right-wing” and “not knowing how to govern.”