Dani Dayan, former leader of the Yesha Counicl in Judea and Samaria and currently a member of the New Hope party, said Wednesday that the faction would prefer to join a coalition with left-wing parties over one led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asserting that 13 years of having Netanyahu in power "is enough."
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In an interview with i24News' Calev Ben-David and Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana, Dayan was asked if New Hope would form a government with Labor despite controversial comments by Arab Israeli Ibtisam Mara'ana, who is No. 7 on the party's slate, about ignoring the siren to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. The former Israeli consul general to New York said she would not be allowed in the coalition.
He noted Labor members had served in ministerial positions in coalition governments led by Netanyahu in the past.
Video: i24News
Dayan cited two reasons for the decision not to join a government with Netanyahu: "The first is the mismanagement. We see this in the corona crisis," he said, noting parents across the country still did not know if their children would be able to go to school the next day.
He said the second and "probably even more important" reason concerned "the toxic discourse, the divisive discourse, the language that is used by Netanyahu and his cohorts, his supporters within the Likud" both inside and outside the Knesset.
He said, given this discourse, it wasn't surprising that the son and granddaughter of the late Likud leaders and Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, Benny Begin and Michal Diamant, had joined New Hope.
This divisive discourse "is not the [Zionist visionary Ze'ev] Jabotinsky legacy, the Menachem Begin legacy, the Shamir legacy," he said.
The most troubling division in Israel "is not between the so-called Right and Left, it's not between religious and secular, it's not about Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, it's not even about Jewish and Arabs. it's about the dividers and the healers, and I want to be a healer," he said. "We have come to change this toxic atmosphere where everything is about 'us' and 'them.'"
Noting he has known Sa'ar for over 30 years, Dayan said the New Hope leader "has the intellectual capacity, the ideological backbone, the management qualities, and last but not least, the moral integrity to be prime minister of Israel."
During the course of the interview, Dayan would not say whether his party would prefer holding a fifth election to joining a Netanyahu-led government.
According to Dayan, Israel would not embark on another election because "either Netanyahu with [New Right leader Naftali] Bennett, [Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel] Smotrich, and probably Ra'am party head Abbas Mansour from the Islamic Movement will get 61 Knesset seats or the mandate will be given to us."
The Likud party responded to Dayan's interview in a statement, Thursday: "Like we said, a vote for Gideon [Sa'ar] or Bennett will be a vote for a left-wing government headed by Lapid. Only the Likud will form a completely right-wing government."
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