Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked his successor, Naftali Bennett, at a Likud faction meeting on Monday for giving in to the demands of Ra'am (United Arab List) in a coalition crisis that was resolved late Sunday night.
Ra’am threatened to stop supporting the coalition on Sunday due to talks with the rival Joint List on a parliamentary safety net. Bennett agreed to a list of demands from Ra'am by the end of the day.
Netanyahu said Bennett "surrendered to Abbas" and "sold him the Negev" three hours after he issued his demands.
Responding to Netanyahu in the Knesset plenum, Bennett said it was Netanyahu who built relations with Abbas, because he saw his political potential. But he said that Netanyahu, unlike him, hid their relationship.
"To meet him and hide it is not being a man," Bennett said. "I don't do things in the dark."
Regarding Netanyahu's accusations that he "sold out the Negev to the Bedouin," Bennett listed Beduin villages the Likud built and asked him to compare pictures of the Negev taken before and after the Likud took over 12 years ago.
Abbas also told the plenum that it was Netanyahu who built ties with him and pledged large sums to the Arab sector "and suddenly now is attacking others for it."
On Sunday evening, the government approved the transfer of certain authorities from the Economy Ministry to the Welfare Ministry. The government statement said that the authorities in question were the senior branch of socio-economic development in the Bedouin society in the Negev, as well as the Bedouin Development and Settlement Authority in the Negev.
Ra'am faction chairman Walid Taha, said on Sunday night that "at the end of a day full of negotiations, and as partners in the coalition, we have reached agreements regarding the immediate implementation of a series of decisions from the Ra'am coalition agreement, in addition to other decisions related to Arab society."
"In the coming days we will witness significant decisions on many issues related to Arab society," Taha added.
New Hope leader Gideon Sa'ar told his faction that any concessions made Sunday to Abbas were already in the coalition agreement. He blasted the opposition for preventing the government from functioning.
"There was never an opposition that sought to delegitimize a government like this one," he said. "This is the continuation of the delegitimization process of the institutions of state and the justice system that has been carried out in recent years, which is now being aimed at the government and Knesset. They oppose everything, they filibuster everything, including laws they agree with, which they passed themselves. This is against the interests of the state." Sa'ar said there were a lot of bills that were not approved because of these fillibusters and the coalition will need to learn how to deal with this phenomenon in order to prevent damage to the State of Israel and it citizens,"This is a lack of responsibility that we have never seen before," he said. "There is a wild style here, incitement, a stream of lies."
Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz also attacked Netanyahu and the government in his faction meeting.
"We were in opposition for many years but we never did what the opposition is doing today," he said. "We never said that the government wasn’t legitimate. We never stopped the Knesset from working."
Idan Zonshine contributed to this report