Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused opposition figures Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman of misleading right-wing voters, branding them representatives of the “fake right” in an exchange with C14’s Sophia Tupolev.
Netanyahu singled out Naftali Bennett for pledging before the previous election not to join a government with the left or the Muslim Brotherhood, only to do so after the vote. “No, fool me once, fool me twice. He’s trying to fool people twice, and I think people should be aware of it,” Netanyahu said.
He also accused Avigdor Liberman of presenting himself as right-wing while repeatedly aligning with the left, pointing to his participation in the Bennett-Lapid government, which relied on support from Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party. Netanyahu further alleged that Liberman, as finance minister, allocated 53 billion shekels in taxpayer funds to NGOs that support Hamas.
Netanyahu warned that a left-wing government would also threaten Israel’s position in Judea and Samaria, stating that their proposed policies would lead to ‘Palestinian’ statehood. Asked whether he would block the creation of such a state, the prime minister responded: “I have been blocking it.”
“We cannot have a Palestinian state because that’s the end of a Jewish state,” he declared.