Avi Gabbay
Avi GabbayYonatan Sindel/Flash90

Zionist Union chairman Avi Gabbay said Sunday that his party is interested in early elections, but it will not help the coalition factions reject them.

"I get messages from the coalition factions, and we are asked to condition the early elections by postponing them to September or another distant date. We are not your suckers and you will not use us as part of a game of political calculations designed to torpedo the early elections," Gabbay said at a conference held by the Israel Democracy Institute and Makor Rishon.

He added, "I want to be clear: we will support the early elections as soon as possible."

Gabbay claimed that ministers Kahlon and Bennett are backing the prime minister with ideological concessions. "Unfortunately, Netanyahu's coalition partners decided that politics are worth giving up on values. They are fighting to maintain his rule instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to go to elections."

"When you look at the years of the current regime, you can clearly identify a long and dangerous sequence, a real system that produces a new enemy every day. And it is not a real enemy. It is neither Iran nor Hezbollah nor Hamas, but invented enemies. The president, the Supreme Court, the Israel Defense Forces and the chief of staff, the police and the commissioner who heads it, and now the attorney general.

"According to Prime Minister Netanyahu, all of them are the new enemies of the people, all of whom agree that these are not enemies at all. They are the symbols of our democratic state, the top gatekeepers for all of us, the heads of the state systems of Israel. We have already seen this on the eve of the last elections, with the Arabs streaming to the polls, the racist and dangerous statement that incites against 20 percent of the citizens of Israel," Gabbay said.

"We see this with the persecution of left-wing organizations, who are constantly accused of treachery and who are being politically persecuted, which has developed into a war against the free media in Israel. Journalists and writers who overnight became the oppressors of Israel. The public system, through the systematic elimination of the status of public gatekeepers, appoints people according to loyalty rather than fitness"

"More recently, this method has been directed at the heart of the Israeli law enforcement system, with the court, the prosecution, and even the police - under an unprecedented campaign of defamation and delegitimization.

"Once they called it 'divide and rule'. Today we can call it 'fall and rule'."