Education Minister Naftali Bennett bristled this evening (Tuesday) over the "religioization" uproar in an interview on the London and Kirschenbaum program.
"There is a deliberate campaign to get me on the defensive because I am determined that every child in the State of Israel knows who Moses is," he said. "My family was murdered in the Holocaust because they were Jews. For thousands of years we have preserved this nation," he said, adding: "What's wrong with them knowing a little Judaism?
"There is a group of people here who want to erase Jewish identity from the face of the earth, they want it to be Sweden here; they do not want to have kiddush and Shabbat, and the result is that there are kindergartens in Tel Aviv that do not want to do the Kabbalat Shabbat prayer on Friday. Is that the result we want?"
During the interview, Bennett accused Channel 10 of collaborating with the Secular Forum in the campaign to destroy Judaism."Stop this war on a bit of Judaism and a bit of Zionism," he said."It is essential that every child in the State of Israel receives a rich Jewish and Zionist package, that he knows what a prayer book is, what Selichot prayers are. There will be no religious coercion.I will not allow this and I object to this on a fundamental level."
In addition, Bennett referred to the law against investigating an incumbent prime minister: "There are two sides to the issue. On the one hand, there is a lot of logic in granting immunity to a prime minister, so that if he wants to do something, he won't be punished.On the other hand, what bothers most of my colleagues is the personalization and the feeling that this is about the Prime Minister personally. Ethically I think it's forbidden to cause a situation in which a public servant will be afraid to enact a law out of concern that the police and the State Prosecutor's Office will take revenge on him, and by the end of the week I will formulate a position and announce it."
Bennett also claimed that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech at the opening of the Knesset's winter session was legitimate."Both the President's speech and the Prime Minister's speech were very fiery speeches, each in his own way.It is legitimate.The President said two things: On the one hand the judicial system has acted improperly for several decades and aggressively penetrated the legislature and the government, while on the other hand he says that the reaction of the current government is excessive and creates polarization."