United Torah Judaism will not join the “bloc for change” if it forms a coalition, UTJ chairman Moshe Gafni said Tuesday, adding that it would go into the opposition with the Likud instead.
“We are not zigzagging on this issue,” Gafni said. “We go with the [religiously] traditional community, which is on the Right. If we need to go to the opposition, we will go to the opposition.”
“Our leading rabbis have instructed us that we should go with the traditional public, which is on the right wing [and] is headed by [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu,” he said. “So we will go with him, and therefore I will not go with anyone else.”
UTJ is ideological and could not be bought by various promises and deals, Gafni said. It would flourish in the opposition, where it would be able to look out for the concerns of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, he said.
Yamina leader MK Naftali Bennett had not asked him to join a government with Yesh Atid and its leader, Yair Lapid, Gafni said. Bennett had not offered a freeze on religion-and-state issues in any such government, he added.
Gafni’s comments essentially rule out such a scenario, leaving the bloc for change with a narrow range of options for forming a coalition, most likely a minority government supported externally by one or both of the Arab parties.