Responding to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wall Street Journal interview last week (WSJ Exclusive: An Interview With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), in which the PM reassured the WSJ’s Dov Lieber he had dropped the override clause from the judicial reform altogether, not only by a simple majority but by any majority, on Tuesday, UTJ co-leader MK Moshe Gafni |insisted in an interview with the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman that “the coalition is a partnership, he cannot decide on his own that he is burying a clause we agreed on.”
Gafni made it clear that after he had spoken with Netanyahu, the override clause was not removed from the agenda.
“Netanyahu expressed his opinion to the American newspaper, but I made it clear to him that our silence is not an admission,” Gafni asserted, adding, “We insist that the agreement we signed with the Likud when forming the government will be fully respected,” and, “I explained to Netanyahu that we are not waging a struggle and we are not going to the media about any statement or interview of one kind or another. But after we talked and clarified things in closed conversations, I can say that Netanyahu understood and explained that the [WSJ interview] does not contradict our agreement.”
Although in his WSJ interview, Netanyahu insisted that he had dropped the override clause entirely, and when Lieber pressed him, he clarified that this meant even with a more significant Knesset majority, on Monday he sang a different tune during a Sunday meeting of the coalition heads, once again suggesting he was against a simple majority override, but favored undoing a High Court ruling with a larger majority.
Bibi is the ultimate rabbi who tells each of the claimants in a case before him that he is right, and when his wife wonders how is it possible for both of them to be right, the rabbi says, You’re also right.
Gafni doesn’t seem to mind.
