Former Defense Minister and Blue and White leader Moshe Ya'alon called for the dismissal of Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz for endorsing conversion therapy for homosexuals.
"We must come back and sing 'We came to expel darkness.'" This is one of the symptoms of the leadership crisis that we are in," MK Ya'alon said on Channel 13's Morning News. "The Justice Minister calls for disobedience to Supreme Court rulings and the Education Minister speaks in an irresponsible and dark manner that is not suitable for the State of Israel. Peretz should be fired just as he should have fired the justice minister."
According to Ya'alon, Rabbi Peretz behaved in a commendable manner as the IDF Chief Rabbi "but something is happening in Religious Zionism, large parts of which I greatly admire. There are parts there that are politicized, where everyone tries to be extreme about women, in relation to LGBT. This is what I call the process of darkness of the State of Israel."
"At the end, Binyamin Netanyahu is responsible for this leadership crisis. Everything is subservient to helping Binyamin Netanyahu escape justice. He faces three serious indictments, subject to a hearing, bribery, breach of trust and deceit, and we all pay the price.
He said that the Blue and White party leaders agreed to unite because of the threat they perceived in Prime Minister Netanyahu. "We united in a short time as a result of a sense of emergency, that the state must be saved. We all worked with Netanyahu. We understand what crisis of leadership we are in. In the end he did not succeed in forming a coalition and now he certainly can not form a coalition. Blue and White is the only alternative government. It connects us very strongly, even if we had arguments about certain issues."
"We decided to run in the same format, with the rotation, and Yair Lapid could be an excellent prime minister. In this format, we won 35 seats. More than one million and one hundred thousand voted for us with the understanding that we are the only alternative to Binyamin Netanyahu. We go together and move each argument aside.
Ya'alon said that Blue and White would not agree to run on a joint list with Ehud Barak's new Democratic Israel party. "There are differences of opinion between us. On the diplomatic issue, Ehud Barak gnawed at the positions of Rabin, of blessed memory. When Rabin spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, he spoke about an entity that is less than a state, that there is no reaching the 1967 lines, a swarm of sovereignty over settlement, on the blocs. At the time, he spoke of the Jordan Valley and united Jerusalem. Did you see what happened to Ehud Barak and what that eventually lead to? There is no problem with having him in the coalition, but he cannot run with Blue and White before the elections."