About two weeks after announcing their merger into a joint party — “Together” — Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid held the party’s launch event Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv.
In front of some 3,500 participants, and against the backdrop of a vote expected next week on dissolving the Knesset, Lapid declared: “I am prepared to sign for you that Bennett can lead the country in the coming years.”
“We are here to end the era of fear,” Lapid added. “The overwhelming majority of Israelis want a government that sees them, that cares about them.”
“There is a real opportunity to fix things, to do everything we promised ourselves during the long march against all the bad winds,” he said. “Today, you are the largest party in the State of Israel, and you will turn it into the next government of the State of Israel.”
Bennett said in his remarks that “the first action we will take, already on the night this election is decided, will be to establish a state commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7 massacre.”
“The draft dodgers’ alliance is collapsing,” he added. “In recent years, Likud has become the executive arm of Deri and Goldknopf.”
“An alliance based on harming IDF soldiers is destined to collapse,” Bennett said. “That is what you are seeing now.”
The party chairman said moving up the dissolution of the Knesset “will be the only good thing this government has done for the people of Israel.”
“This government weakened the IDF and has not woken up from Oct. 7,” he said. “They are continuing the same failed conception. A failed conception begins when the boss silences people from telling the truth. That is exactly what the ministers of this terrible government are doing. Netanyahu and his band send out a swarm of poison-machine drones against anyone who expresses a position that does not serve his survival.”
Bennett said this can be seen when IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir “dares to say he lacks soldiers.”
“The fighters are under operational fatigue and are also forced to capture the same place again and again because there are not enough soldiers,” he said. “It costs us soldiers’ lives. Instead of solving the problem, they shoot arrows of venom at him. What, you don’t want to know the real damage you are causing through draft-dodging? This is exactly how we got Oct. 7, and this is the recipe for another disaster.”
He declared that “after the 2023 failure, we will bring a historic change, a change of hope.”
“This coalition of madness is under pressure, flooding the internet with embarrassing AI videos and going wild — because they know we will win,” Bennett said. “They know better than all of us that they have no achievement to show. When in the real world you have brought upon us only failures and disasters, you flee to an imaginary world of AI videos. The Likud party has become an empty shell without a soul. The values have disappeared.”
“Jabotinsky, Begin and Shamir are turning in their graves when they see a cocktail of Kahanists, draft dodgers and corrupt figures who have taken over their party,” he added. “Likud voters are sick of it and are finding a home with us. That is why Netanyahu is hysterical. He is hysterical over the hope born here. And his hysteria is justified — because this hope will replace the government in Israel.”