Netanyahu, Liberman criticized over Gaza cease-fire
The latest round of Israel-Hamas fighting, the most severe since the war they fought in 2014, has intensified criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.
“The prime minister is bankrupt. The emperor has no clothes. There has never been such a gap between meaningless talk and operational impotence. … [Hamas Gaza commander] Sinwar humiliates Bibi [Netanyahu]. He decides when to fire, when to cease fire, when to renew it. Pathetic.” This was the outspoken reaction by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to the latest cease-fire with Hamas engineered this week by his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Barak’s diatribe was not surprising. He has long been a strident one-man opposition to Netanyahu in almost daily interviews and taunts on social media against the Netanyahu government in general and Netanyahu specifically.
However, some of the criticism against the Israel-Hamas cease-fire that ended a 24-hour spurt of fighting on Nov. 13 emanated also from other, more unexpected places. Sharon Gal, a one-time Knesset member of the Yisrael Beitenu party led by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, dubbed his former benefactor “a toy Rambo.” Gal, who stepped down from his Knesset seat after only nine months, added, “I am ashamed of having been a member of your party.”
Knesset member Oren Hazan of the Likud, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, also took to Twitter to express shame with his government over the decision to accept a cease-fire with Hamas. “If a left-wing government had been behind this security fiasco, a million people would have come out and set the town squares on fire,” he tweeted, presenting a reasonable scenario.
