Former Shabak (Interior Security) chief Yuval Diskin on Friday launched verbal invective against the coalition government, accusing them of "abandoning the country."
"The sane centrist (parties) are abandoning the country to a hollow party of the shallow right-wing (Likud), controlled by a band of extreme firebrands that signed a pact with the Yesh Atid party - which engraved on its flag 'equality of burden' and removed it from among us - and with the national religious Jewish Home party, in whose eyes unity of the land is more important than unity of the people," charged Diskin in a column in Yedioth Ahronoth.
Rounding out the coalition, Diskin remarked on "the Yisrael Beytenu party, whose ideology is appropriated to the needs of one man, the secret insider of the dubious oligarchs, that escaped by the skin of his teeth from the short arm of the law and since then, (apparently) became a moderate pursuer of peace."
Diskin sharpened his warning, writing "in my eyes and the eyes of many I talk with, the country has lost its vision, direction and path; its current leadership feels great security because it isn't threatened even when it leads us to national, social and financial disaster."
However, not all was doom and gloom for the former Shabak head. "On the one hand, I'm optimistic, because even today the Zionist centrists and the sane people on its margins to the right and left are still the majority in the country."
"On the other hand, I'm pessimistic, because the same centrists I talk about are the silent drowsy or 'sleeping' majority, that see how the country is being stolen from under their hands -- and stay silent," wrote Diskin.
In order for there to be a "meaningful change" in terms of national direction, Diskin called for unity among all "centrist" parties.
Last December, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office responded to Diskin's various verbal attacks by saying "Netanyahu will not be affected by recycled statements or by righteous preaching arising from the personal frustration of someone who wanted to be appointed head of the Mossad by Netanyahu and did not get the position."
The response came after Diskin claimed there were "too many Jews" in Judea and Samaria for it to be handed over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), calling on Israel to be a country "which prefers the sanctity of its people over the sanctity of its land," and which "does not feel it has to occupy others' land."