Moshe Feiglin once said that one cannot swim in muddy water without getting dirty. That's right. And Moshe's right-hand man, Shmuel Sackett, gave a proof to it in his recent article, which he titled "Eidelberg's Obsession with Feiglin".



The purpose of the article was not to provide answers to serious questions Professor Paul Eidelberg persistently poses as to the future of the nationalist camp in Israel, and how it can save Israel as a Jewish State. No, Mr. Sackett makes no attempt to answer those questions - he simply doesn't have any answers. Neither does Moshe Feiglin. Therefore, the latter assigned the former, while carefully avoiding the discussion itself, to disparage Prof. Eidelberg and discredit him, thus making the discussion itself irrelevant.



But what can be better for this end than distorting and inventing facts? And this is what Mr. Sackett does in his article.



To begin with, he makes an unknowing reader believe that Prof. Eidelberg is somehow responsible for the entire history of the Yamin Israel party, which he in fact joined only in the year 2000. Mr. Sackett also relies on the short memory of the public and completely distorts the party's history, adding what he sells for "facts" at his convenience. As a chairwoman of Yamin Israel since 1999, I am in the position to set the record straight.



Thus, for example, "an expert" in Israeli political history, Mr. Sackett writes:
"On May 17, 1999 elections were held once again for the Knesset and a united right-wing bloc was formed; Herut, Moledet and Tekuma. The Yemin Yisrael party did not join together in this bloc and, once again, ran on its own. This time 49,672 votes were needed as a minimum and although they couldn't get 44,000 votes in '96 they assured the people of Israel that they would pass the minimum. Once again, many thousands of people believed them and voted Yemin Yisrael and, once again, the precious votes were wasted."
Yamin Israel did not run at all in 1999. Moreover, when it was announced that a united right-wing bloc was under formation, the present writer was the first to call and offer negotiations, intending to join the bloc. However, the negotiations ran into an obstacle even before they started. My introductory statement that instead of fighting for "realistic" slots on the joint list we are going to insist that our most important principles be included in the party platform, was followed by a cautious question: "And what are they?"



"Well," I said, "the first and foremost is passing a law that will make the Jewish State into a paramount principle of the State of Israel."



To my complete dismay, this triggered a long silence and then a stuttering response: "We did want to include that as well, but we had to drop it."



"Why?"



"Because we are afraid that it may turn away the people who, we hope, will agree to head our united right-wing bloc."



"But who are these people?"



"Benny Begin and Uzi Landau."



There was nothing to discuss after that. But seeing the enthusiasm of the nationalist camp about the newly established "nationalist" party, Yamin Israel made a strategic decision: not to run in the forthcoming elections in order to let this "united nationalists" take all the votes they can and then show their real face.




In the Yamin Israel announcement of this decision in April 1999, I wrote in the party newspaper Jewish Israel, in an the article titled "Big Names and Empty Slogans":
"The only thing a strong right-wing party could do in the next Knesset is raise the question of what flaws of Israel's political system resulted in the detrimental 'territory for peace' policy.... However, the leadership of the united right-wing party refuses even to discuss these issues. It is hard to expect that their position will change after the elections, even if they collect all the nationalist camp votes. ...Yamin Israel has put these issues at the head of its party program. However, in order to hear our arguments and understand the absolute urgency of solving these problems, the electorate has first to get proof that unity around a void cannot serve as a solution. ...Even if the right-wing united party gets the maximum possible number of votes, it will prove its complete inability to change anything. We hope that then the voter will understand the simple truth: voting for big names and empty slogans, we risk losing the Jewish State."
For the likes of Shmuel Sackett, to defend the Manhigut Yehudit merger with the Likud, one of their favorite tactics is to claim that Feiglin has sufficient experience with trying to establish a united nationalist front. Another lie. Since the very beginning - theirs and ours - Yamin Israel offered Moshe Feiglin negotiations to discuss a possible coalition of forces. Feiglin consistently declined. He insisted on going alone. This was long before he received an offer from the Likud wise men to attempt a "takeover from within", and certainly remained his position afterwards. Before the 2003 elections, we once again offered to join forces with him in establishing a united nationalist front of all right-wing extra-parliamentary groups, on the basis of Yamin Israel, and we offered him leadership of the party. Again, he declined.



When we joined the Herut in order to not split the votes of the nationalist camp, all the so-called right-wing parties started wasting their campaign money for the sake of destroying our chances of overcoming the threshold. The Professors for a Strong Israel press release that Sackett cites in his article is loud proof of that. It distorts the truth, concealing the fact that Herut and Yamin Israel had formed a joint list, aside from allowing a right-wing party to use the guise of a non-political organization.



As a result, the joint list of Herut-Yamin Israel fell 5,000 votes short, as Sackett writes. In reality, a great number of votes were simply stolen, when unidentified 'ideological allies' removed slips from the voting booths and made voting in our favor impossible. I found it in four out of six booths that I personally supervised.



Thus, Sackett appears in the article to be less than an "expert" not only in simple arithmetic, but even more so in simple truth, proving once again Moshe Feiglin's thoughtful statement at the opening of the present article.