By Caroline Glick, Jpost—
If Blue and White Party leader MK Benny Gantz forms a minority government with Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu Party and the Labor-Meretz party, based on the outside support of the Joint Arab List, Gantz’s success will torpedo Israel’s relations with the United States.
This week, a senior official who was present during Gantz’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in late January revealed: “Gantz committed in the Oval Office that, if he became prime minister, he would form a government of people that would support the president’s peace deal.”
The Trump peace plan includes applying Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. Labor-Meretz and the Joint Arab List are both violently opposed to the Trump plan. A Gantz government that includes them will be a government that is hostile to the Trump plan.
The only way for Gantz to keep the promise he made to Trump is to join a coalition government led by Netanyahu with Likud and its right-religious coalition partners. And that is an option that Gantz and his partners in the Blue and White “cockpit” – fellow former IDF chiefs of General Staff Moshe Yaalon and Gadi Ashkenazy and former media star Yair Lapid – will not support.
They are working feverishly to cobble together a radical government with the post-Zionists in Labor-Meretz and the anti-Zionists in the Joint Arab List. All of which will be hard-pressed to work with the Trump administration.
How can Trump or his administration trust a man who flat out lied to the President in the Oval Office?
What can explain Gantz’s irresponsible behavior?
Did he lie to Trump – and the Israeli public – because he and his colleagues are secretly radical leftists who seek power to undermine everything Israel stands for? They wouldn’t be the first leftist politicians to do so.
In 1999, their commander, former IDF chief of General Staff Ehud Barak ran against Netanyahu by presenting himself as ideologically indistinguishable from him. Barak insisted that he would implement Netanyahu’s center-right policies, but that he would do so with the support of the media and the leftist elite.
The public bought his act. Barak – the centrist – defeated Netanyahu and Barak – the leftist – offered PLO chief Yasser Arafat Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Temple Mount as well as the Golan Heights to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad.
Israel is a center-right country. Barak understood the only way for a leftist to win an election in Israel is to pretend to be a center-rightist. Continue Reading….