Netanyahu Vows to Bring Down Lapid-Bennett Government ‘Very Quickly’
by i24 News
i24 News – A belligerent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised on Sunday that he will act swiftly to bring down the “change coalition” led by Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and Yamina leader Naftali Bennett, which is widely expected to be voted into government within days, ending Netanyahu’s remarkable 12-year reign as the head of Israeli government.
“We will come out with force against the formation of this dangerous coalition of fraud and surrender, and if God forbid it is established — we’ll overthrow it very quickly,” the leader told his Likud party associates.
Addressing the growing number of threats against Yamina and other coalition lawmakers, Netanyahu said that “we condemn all forms of incitement from any side, even when others remain mum while the incitement against us runs rampant,” he said.
“I want to explain what incitement is. It’s not criticism. It’s a call for violence. It’s crossing the line between criticism and incitement. For a long time, there have been terrible calls to murder my family, my wife — and silence. An almost complete silence in the general discourse and the media.”
He added that he felt the right-wing discourse was treated as a danger regardless of content.
“You can’t treat criticism from the right as incitement and criticism from the left as a legitimate expression of the freedom of speech. It is an attempt to frame the right as something dangerous to democracy, which is an idea that runs counter to that of democracy. We need to understand what is happening here. We are witnessing the biggest election fraud in the history of the country, and perhaps in the history of democracy. People rightly feel cheated.”