Eisenkot says Bennett-Lapid uniting without him is ‘not how you build partnerships’ |
Yashar chairman Gadi Eisenkot criticized the union of former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, telling party activists during a conference on Thursday that he had pushed for months to create a large centrist party to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Eisenkot was previously reported to have proposed a merger in January with Bennett and Lapid, both of whom had courted the former IDF chief of staff for their own parties.
“The main alternative I tried to promote about six months ago was organizing the camp that the media calls center-left, and which I call the statesmanlike camp, that would go with the liberal right. My thought was to form an optimized structure that would bring the maximum number of votes and lead to victory — certainly not to repeat what happened in the last elections,” Eisenkot said in a recording published by the Ynet news site on Sunday, alluding to fragmentation and lost votes among opposition parties.
Such a party, he said, would have included the electoral slates led by Bennett and Lapid, but not Yair Golan’s The Democrats or Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, in order to give voters three alternatives: a “super-party” in the center alongside left- and right-wing alternatives.
However, he did not succeed and ultimately received a phone call informing him of Bennett and Lapid’s union only minutes before it was publicly announced, after which the two said they had “opened the door for me and were even saving the second and third spots for me,” Eisenkot continued.
“That’s not how you build partnerships, but I’m not insulted. I immediately picked up the phone and said let’s meet and continue to cooperate. What guides me........