The housing protesters on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and in Saturday
night’s demonstrations should make their protests political and concentrate on
replacing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a Kadima-led government, Kadima
leaders and activists said on Friday.
Speaking at a special session of
the Kadima council at the party’s Petah Tikva headquarters, MK Shaul Mofaz
issued a fierce attack against the prime minister.
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“Netanyahu responds
out of fear and anxiety,” Mofaz said. “He has lost touch with reality. He is in
vertigo. He can’t control the situation and lead. We must take power away from
him.”
Mofaz said that the prime minister lacked the courage to take
action on either diplomatic or socioeconomic issues.
“This guy was born
with a silver spoon in his mouth,” Mofaz said. “He doesn’t know what it’s like
to pay a mortgage like regular Israelis do. In two years, he has trampled the
middle class, harmed the young people who are Israel’s future, and taken away
their hope. We can’t let him continue.”
Kadima leader Tzipi Livni
complained that Netanyahu refused to reopen the state budget to fix price
increases. She said he cared only about stopping the protests and not about
fixing the situation.
Livni called Netanyahu’s economic policies
extremists and said they had been proved wrong in other countries.
She
said the government’s expenditures on keeping sectarian parties satisfied should
anger people who can’t afford an apartment and parents whose children are
considering working abroad.
Kadima council head Haim Ramon disagreed with
attempts by the protesters to prevent their demonstrations from becoming too
political. He said that “all protests are political” and aimed at the country’s
decision-makers.
But a housing protester who attended the event heckled
speakers, saying “We know Bibi [Netanyahu] is bad, but you are bad
too.”
A Likud spokeswoman responded to the attacks by Mofaz and Livni by
saying that it was Kadima-led governments that stopped building apartments in
the center of the country and roads from the periphery, and didn’t invest in
higher education.
“Livni is that last person who could speak about such
things,” the Likud spokeswoman said. “Kadima is panicking because of its poor
situation in the polls. The Netanyahu government can handle the current
situation the best.”
Israel Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman called a
press conference for Sunday to address the socioeconomic situation and
developments in the Knesset.
