Yisrael Beytenu MK and former Defense Minister Avidgor Liberman urged Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday to keep a low profile with regards to his sovereignty plan.
Liberman, a former Netanyahu ally who bolted from the right-wing bloc last year, turning into one of the prime minister’s most vocal critics, called on Netanyahu to keep quiet about his plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria.
“The whole story about sovereignty in the Jordan Valley and Judea and Samaria, which Netanyahu keeps chatting about since April 7th 2019, can be summed up by a single sentence from the famous Western film, ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,’” wrote Liberman in a Facebook post Monday.
“When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk,” continued Liberman, quoting Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramírez from Sergio Leone’s iconic 1966 Spaghetti Western.
Liberman went on to compare Netanyahu’s plan to the 1981 Golan Heights law, which extended Israeli law to the Golan.
“On December 14th 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin brought the Golan Heights Law to the Knesset for three votes. Without a lot of talking and nonsense, and before all of the bill’s opponents – both in Israel and around the world, had time to blink.”
“But with Netanyahu, there’s a lot of talk, zero action. If he really wanted to annex Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley, so why not now, when there is a broad consensus on it, like Netanyahu said before the last election? The prime minister’s concealing of the plan and the maps from the Yesha Council, from the IDF chief of staff, and from the head of the Shin Bet prove that this isn’t a serious plan, and that it is intended to serve Netanyahu’s electoral interests, rather than the national interests of the State of Israel.”