I'm sorry, Avigdor Liberman, but you've lost touch with the public and with reality. The country is going up in flames, and you are only interested in yourself, busy with your own needs, and putting your own interests first.
You should know, Mr. Liberman, that the Israeli public is fed up of politicians, of the wall-to-wall failure of which you have been a considerable part for quite a few years now, in several parties and posts. The public does not understand what you are all doing there, yourself in particular. It has had enough of the irresponsibility, of the unconcern, of which you became the figurehead this afternoon.
Today? Now? This is the time you found appropriate for setting out your political stall? Today is the day you saw fit to differentiate your political product from Benjamin Netanyahu and to declare independence, just in order to survive in politics? Mid-July, a heatwave in this battered and grieving country, and "Color Red" alerts and Kassam rockets falling in communities bordering the Gaza Strip, are the cruel background music to the news of your decision to break up Likud-Beitenu, another androgynous creature born here out of the fears and scheming of people like you and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Shelly Dadon was cruelly murdered by Hussein Halifah; Muhammad Abu Khdair was murdered by Jews who burnt him alive; Border Guard police smashed in the face of his cousin, Tariq Abu Khdair. No-one can rely on police emergency services; riots by Arab Israelis are raging north and south; the teenagers' kidnappers are still at large, and the seven days of mourning after the funerals of Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel, and Gilad Sha'ar are not yet over.
So now? Right now? You and Netanyahu are a sort of unromantic romance, steeped in jealousy-hatred-interest-patronage, that has gone on for 25 years. You got together several times, parted even more times, and if you survive, both of you, this current sordid episode, then we can presume that this cycle, this loveless marriage, will go through more turns. You will again link up, and again part, and again use each other in order to survive.
You should know, Mr. Liberman, that the public - right and left, religious and secular, new arrivals and veterans, west of the Green Line and east of it - hates those who force it to go to the polls again and again, who undermine governments, break ranks, and put spokes in the wheel in the middle of a war, and it doesn't trust those who force it to finance hundreds of millions of shekels for an election campaign.
"This is a multi-colored coalition" is how you described it in your afternoon speech. Now you realize that? But you fought, and even compelled your former friend Netanyahu to keep the foreign minister's seat for you. What exactly did you think you were going into?
"My stance is not motivated by political considerations," you said today. In other times, it might have been possible to accept that. Under fire no.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 7, 2014
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