Moshe Feiglin
Moshe FeiglinIsrael news photo: Yoni Kempinski

Moshe Feiglin, head of the Likud's Manhigut Yehudit faction, said Thursday that he was planning to once again take on Binyamin Netanyahu for leadership of the Likud. In a statement Thursday, Feiglin said that he plans to run against – and hopefully beat – Netanyahu for the leadership of the Likud.

And if that sounds like an out-of-this-world theory, Feiglin says, consider that the last time the two faced off, he garnered 24% of the votes cast in the Likud primaries. Not bad for a “dark horse!”

The Likud will on January 31 hold its election for party chairman. The winner of this primary will be the candidate who will run for Prime Minister of Israel from the Likud at the next general election – and all polls indicate that the man who wins the primary will be Israel's next Prime Minister, as the Likud is overwhelmingly favored to win the next election, currently scheduled for 2013. “In essence,” the statement said, “this vote is to determine who will be the next Prime Minister of the State of Israel.”

Feiglin says that there is a clear choice in the election – himself or Netanyahu, whose ideas and viewpoints fall on a very distinct side of the ideological divide. Feiglin, his statement says, “president of Manhigut Yehudit - the largest faction of the Likud party - wishes to create a strong, proud Jewish State by ending the fraudulent Oslo Process, ending the taking of all foreign aid, and re-attaching Israelis to their Jewish roots.” Unlike Netanyahu, who has done nothing but look for ways to enhance and expand the Oslo process, and continues to turn Israel into a dependent client state of the U.S.

“Feiglin,” the statement says, “about whom former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg said last week is the 'most important man today in Israeli political discourse', wishes for Israel to be a Light Unto the Nations, as opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s stated desire to find Israel's Place Among the Nations (the title of Netanyahu's book). Feiglin feels that when Israel’s decisions are made taking into account that Israel should be run according to Jewish values – as opposed to being run according to secular, socialist or globalist values – then Israel will make better decisions and will be on course toward a brighter future.”

In addition, says Feiglin, Netanyahu's not only lied when he promised to encourage Jewish settlement in Yesha during the last elections – he is actually doing the opposite. “Netanyahu is actively trying to create a Jew-free state of ‘palestine’ inside the biblical heartland of Israel. He pursues this policy even though earlier in his career he stated that the ‘palestinians’ already had a state called Jordan and that they had no right to have another one at Israel’s expense.

At that time, Mr. Netanyahu also agreed with Newt Gingrich’s recent comments about the ‘palestinians’ being a modern invention created solely to oppose the state of Israel,” the statement says, adding that “The false peace of Oslo has brought nothing but death, destruction and the loss of belief in our own cause to Israel and to Jews worldwide. Israeli withdrawals and statements like the recent one from Mr. Netanyahu that he will "be creative when it comes to [dividing] Jerusalem" only serve to raise the confidence of anti-Semites and terrorists around the globe. It is time for Israel to reverse course before it fades away.”