i24 News – Israel’s Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar denied on Wednesday that he was in talks with Likud and its leader, Bibi Netanyahu, about forming a government together.
In interviews aired on Israel’s leading broadcasters, Sa’ar said, “there are and were no negotiations with Likud.”
However, he refused three times to explicitly state that he wouldn’t sit in a Netanyahu-led government, but did criticize the opposition leader for refusing to support a settler legal protection bill.
The bill would renew a measure extending Israeli civil and criminal law to West Bank settlers, and Sa’ar is fighting to get the bill renewed. However, the opposition – which ideologically supports the bill – refuses to vote on any coalition-sponsored law.
“For his personal interest, Netanyahu is waging a campaign against the core national interest of the state of Israel,” Sa’ar said, according to The Times of Israel.
When reminded that, before the elections, Sa’ar said he wouldn’t join a government with Netanyahu, and when asked to repeat that pledge, he stated, “my stance hasn’t changed.”
The head of the right-wing New Hope party denied reports of talks between Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin and the Likud party as well in interviews with Channels 11 and 13 News.
He said neither he nor Elkin had been in any talks, although “not a week goes by without emissaries [of opposition parties] coming to us,” Haaretz reported.
Let’s see if he proves to have more integrity than Bennett, who promised and wrote down that he would never join with Lapid, yet did so a month later.
Do politicians ever have integrity?
Same old same old.