The 21st Knesset has been dissolved, less than a month after it was sworn in. The Knesset approved the Knesset Dispersion Law on Wednesday evening by a majority of 74 to 45.
The elections for the 22nd Knesset will take place on September 17, just six months after the last elections.
“The Israeli public made a clear and unequivocal decision: That I would be prime minister and that the Likud would lead a right-wing government. The public chose me to lead the State of Israel. The various parties that ran for Knesset, many of them said they would support me. 60 out of the 65 mandates granted to the right did what they undertook upon themselves to do. One party did the exact opposite. Avigdor Liberman misled his voters. From the get go, he had no intention of joining the government,” said Netanyahu.
“In eight months Avigdor Liberman is dragging the country twice to elections because of personal whims and an attempt to get a few more seats. Simply unbelievable. Avigdor Liberman is now part of the left, he is the heart of the left,” Netanyahu continued, blasting the Yisrael Beytenu chairman.
United Torah Judaism chairman, Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, said after the Knesset was dissolved, “The holding of new elections a month after the last elections is contrary to the will of the people and contrary to all common sense. This is political coercion for no real reason, with an awful waste of billions that can go to important things like adding resources to the health care system, education or any other purpose for the good of the public.”
“The cynical use of the Draft Law is an outrageous excuse meant to confuse the public with the goal of inciting against the haredi public and making political capital on it. Torah study has always been and will always remain an important value for the people of Israel. Preserving the status of yeshiva students was the basis for our joining every government and every coalition. It is clear to everyone that we will not be able to agree to any law that restricts Torah scholars in Israel,” added Litzman.
”The decision to go to new elections is a scandal and a failure caused by one politician named Avigdor Liberman, who chose to disguise his desire to prevent Binyamin Netanyahu from establishing the government for his own reasons with a campaign of incitement and blatant humiliation of the haredi public, its leaders and representatives in the Knesset.
Throughout the entire period of negotiations, I said on every stage that what bothers Liberman is not the issue of enlistment, but rather his obsessive desire to hurt Netanyahu because of personal motives and this, unfortunately, was proven true.
We always knew that Liberman, unlike Yair Lapid, did not hate the haredim and was always proud of his closeness to them. Nevertheless, he chose cynicism and cold-bloodedness to trample on the haredi public and to misrepresent in order to serve his political and personal motives on our backs.
History has proven time after time that those who persecute the Torah have disappeared from the public agenda and have been forgotten, and his fate will be the same.”