The chairman of the New Right party, Minister Naftali Bennet, has made his ambitions known to voters ahead of elections, and he sees himself as Israel’s next Defense Minister. Bennet was a commander in the elite Sayeret Matkal Special Forces unit, and during Operation Protective Edge, in the summer of 2014, he was the audible voice of the Security Cabinet criticizing his colleagues publicly. Bennet insists that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu throughout the past decade has been a good prime minister, but he hasn’t managed to implement an acceptable policy regarding the Hamas administration in Gaza and the continued firing of rockets into southern Israel, as well as incendiary balloons, are the result of a lack of Israeli deterrence.

At the Maariv Conference addressing national security, he revealed he has a ‘Biyur Chametz’ plan to halt the rocket attacks from Gaza.

Bennet insists that it was he that revealed the Hamas tunnels, and this led to the expanded IDF program to detect and eliminate those tunnels over recent years, and today, he insists he can do the same regarding the unacceptable situation in Gaza, as southern residents are compelled to live under constant threat of attack.

“We must defeat Hamas,” he said. “It does not decree that a terrorist organization that is not particularly huge has for 15 years held a million Israelis under fire. Hamas is running the business, dragging the Israeli prime minister in the middle of an important and responsible political visit and a generation of children is waking up with nightmares among psychologists [as a result of rocket fire].”

Bennett said that “I slept in the Gaza vicinity, there were five Red Alerts that night.”

We created a self-fear and paralysis among the decision-makers when I set up a plan to prevent the infiltration of 30 terrorist tunnels that penetrated from Gaza into Israel and called on the cabinet to surprise them [the enemy]. The entire top echelon of the security establishment did not want to. Defense Minister Bogi [Ya’alon] and Prime Minister Netanyahu: indecision, procrastination and abstention. How, given the certainty of dozens of tunnels ready for the terrorist attack, is Israel is paralyzed? Their answer was, ‘They have not deterred Hamas.’

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)