National Unity Party chairman MK Benny Gantz on Sunday responded to Labor chairwoman Merav Michaeli, whose party quit the negotiations on the judicial reform on the grounds that there are negotiations being held under the table and which are hidden from public view.
Speaking at a conference in Modi’in, which he attended together with MK Hili Tropper, Gantz said, "I am not ready to give up one millimeter of Israeli democracy, let no one tell you stories about so-called deals that are closed in the dark, that is a lie."
"I really want to reach agreements that will strengthen democracy and serve all of society - and I will do everything so there will be no such a thing as enemies of each other from within in the State of Israel. I will devote all my efforts so that this never happens," he added.
"In the last election campaign there were a variety of issues on the table: Governance, internal security, cost of living, and of course security. The coalition's decision to promote anti-democratic legislation was not on the table, and harm to democracy is not acceptable to the majority of Israeli citizens," added the chairman of the National Unity Party.
MK Tropper said at the conference, "We see the latest polls and are not basking in them, but we mainly understand that there is a trend here and that there is a demand among the people for our path. We were the first ones to call for negotiations, we also paid a price for it, but we continued on our path, not because we did polls and we saw that it would bring us seats, but because we truly believed that this was the right way and today we see that we were not wrong."
"The credit for stopping the legislation goes entirely to the public, a large part of this success was due to the expansion to wider audiences, and what is important now is to focus on our great mission and that is to connect to even larger audiences in Israeli society," said Tropper.