Netanyahu Accuses Lapid of Inciting Rebellion Among Military Officers

By Staff, Agencies

The Zionist entity’s Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday castigated outgoing prime minister Yair Lapid for “attempting to incite rebellion among military officers and local authorities against the elected government.”

His comments came after Lapid urged local authority leaders not to cooperate with an extremist far-right member of the incoming government on educational issues, and after he was reported to warn a military general earlier this week against allowing the far-right “to gain control over the military.”

“Lapid’s conduct is dangerous and hurts democracy,” Netanyahu said in a statement. We must leave the military out of any political debate. Senior officers certainly must not be incited to rebellion against a government that was elected by the people. It crosses a red line; he went on to say.

Netanyahu added that when Likud was in the opposition “we never incited against the government.”

The future premier urged Lapid and the expected opposition “to act in a responsible manner.”

Lapid responded with an angry diatribe.

“Mr. Netanyahu, I won’t take lessons in democracy from you. Not from someone who runs a foreign-funded poison machine that deals in slander and defamation of the lowest kind. Not from the one who currently appointed a person convicted of supporting terror to be minister of internal security and a serial convicted felon to the Minister of the Interior,” Lapid said.

“Not from someone who broke every promise he ever made and even his partners admit he is a serial liar,” Lapid added. “There was not a single moment in the last year and a half that you respected democracy.”

Netanyahu’s accusations came, according to a Friday report in Haaretz, after Lapid made the aforementioned comments to a top army officer during a military drill this week.

The report, which did not cite sources, said the officer recounted to Lapid a meeting of the ‘Israeli’ military General Staff a day earlier, in which senior military officials expressed frustration over the “lack of support from ministers in the incoming government.”

It was an apparent reference to the right-wing fracas over a decision to punish a soldier who taunted left-wing activists in al-Khalil about the incoming right-wing government.