Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin is not letting up on his criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
A day after blasting Netanyahu as weak when it comes to the peace process with the Palestinian Authority and saying there were “too many Jews” living in Judea and Samaria, Diskin on Thursday mocked Netanyahu over his expense report.
“I heard the Prime Minister Office’s response to my comments last night and I thought that at least this time they did not use the words of the late Arik Einstein to ignore the essence of the problem on the table," Diskin wrote on his Facebook page.
"Very soon they will probably send Gila Gamliel and Gilad Erdan and all the other lackeys to explain why it's okay to own three houses at the expense of the state, buy ice cream at 10,000 shekels, pay 84,000 for water, take suitcases full of clothes for cleaning and ironing in hotels abroad, and spend 6,000 shekels for scented candles - as the Prime Minister needs to concentrate on removing the Iranian threat ... sad. We all hear it and remain silent,” he added.
Earlier this week it was revealed that Netanyahu exceeded the budget for his residences by a million shekels.
The expenditure report showed that the total household expenditure for the Prime Minister's residences in Jerusalem and Caesarea reached 3.2 million shekels in 2012.
This figure comprised 2.9 million shekels for the official Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem and 312,000 shekels for his private home in Caesarea. The taxpayer must foot this bill even though annual expenditure of only 2.2 million shekels had been approved for the Prime Minister's homes.
Israelis were outraged several months ago when it was revealed that the budget of the Prime Minister’s Residence, which stood at 3 million shekels in 2009, jumped to 5.4 million shekels by 2012 - an increase of 80%.
Several months earlier, the Hebrew-language financial daily Calcalist reported that Netanyahu’s staff had allocated an annual budget of 9,714 shekels for ice cream for the Netanyahu family. The ice cream was purchased from a local Jerusalem ice cream parlor which the Prime Minister had a particular fondness for.
Diskin’s remarks on Thursday referred to the response by Netanyahu’s office to the expenditure report, in which the PMO invoked the late Israeli singer Arik Einstein who passed away last week and, in an interview in 1998, said that the media was “sucking Netanyahu’s blood.”
“They act with horrible injustice toward Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Einstein said at the time. “They abuse him, and I’m simply shocked at the force of the disrespect and hatred .... To what degree can one suck out his life’s blood?”