Opposition to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant exploded immediately after the news broke yesterday. Yair Lapid, leader of the opposition in the Knesset, called the firing of Gallant in the middle of a war “an act of madness,” reported the Times of Israel. “Netanyahu is selling out Israel’s security and the IDF’s fighters for [his own] disgraceful political survival.”
Among others slamming Netanyahu’s firing of Gallant were Yisrael Beytenu party chairman and former defense minister Avigdor Liberman and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “Instead of taking care of national security first and putting the welfare of the citizens and soldiers first, the prime minister decided to fire the defense minister and start a new round of appointments during the fighting, all in order to meet shameful political needs,” Liberman declared in a post on X. Bennett posted a short video on X accusing Israel’s leadership of betraying its soldiers. “We have sick and crazy leadership that has lost all connection to what is important to the State of Israel, and is essentially working against the State of Israel, against the soldiers,” he said in the video. “I call on our soldiers on all fronts: Don’t lose focus against the enemy. If you guard us, we the public will guard you. Don’t despair, change is coming,” he wrote in a post accompanying the clip.
Gallant’s plan to draft thousands of ultra-Orthodox Haredi men into the army amid Netanyahu’s support for a draft law to sabotage that plan was also seen as a factor. “A defense minister who announces conscription orders for thousands of Haredim is fired in the middle of a war on the eve of an [expected Iranian] attack for the sake of the [draft] evasion law,” asserted National Unity lawmaker Orit Farkash-Hacohen. “There is no low to which this government will not sink,” she said.
