The chairman of the Jewish Home, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked was interviewed on Channel 13 this evening (Wednesday), in the shadow of the defeat in the last elections, and said that her joining the change government, for which she paid a political price, was a decision she made because she thought at the time that it was the right thing to do.
Shaked: “I don’t think I will return to cooperate with Bennett in the future”
“At that point in time, the alternative was either to form this government, for which I knew I would pay a heavy political price, or to go for more elections. Today people don’t understand, but after Netanyahu failed to form a government four times, and that’s even after he qualified Ram to sit in the government , at that point in time I made a decision about what was right for the country, I knew it was to my political detriment. My apology, which came later, was for breaking promises, we as elected officials should try not to break our promises. As a lesson, we had one commitment, to go with the right-wing bloc.”
When asked where she failed, Shaked replied that “we failed to pass the threshold, we fought as part of the right-wing camp, in the end the public chose the parties that were in the opposition. We were consistent, even with Yoaz Handel we said that the right thing was a unity government, but the disagreement between us was that if there is no unity government A narrow right-wing government should be established, that was the reason for the split. Now this government has been formed, I am happy and hope that it will do good things.”
The Minister of the Interior added that even though she knew about her party’s position in the polls, she decided to run to the end: “I ran to the end because it is a message that if I fight to the end then I fight to the end. I received thousands of messages before and after the election campaign, how many people are happy that they put B at the ballot box. The result is exciting, 55,000 people who put the ballot in the ballot box, when they knew that there is a high chance that we will not pass the percentage of blocking.”
Shaked noted that the right-wing bloc encouraged her to continue running: “Netanyahu understood that it was good for the bloc, and they said that from a bloc point of view it was good, so if we want to run we get their blessing, we talked about it with Yariv Levin. A few days before the elections they understood that it was true, Until then, they ran a campaign against us that we will withdraw.”
In addition, the interior minister denied that there was an incident where she was told by the Likud that if she persevered in running in the elections, she would receive something in return: “I didn’t ask for anything, and I didn’t get anything. There was no such thing.”
Shaked referred to the former Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, and her old political partner: “There are some choices that I think he made that were not correct. We look at things differently, I left and entered the same person, and he (Bennett) testifies to himself that he entered and left a different person, I don’t think this is an ideological transformation, he belongs to the right wing, I don’t think he has changed ideologically, from the political point of view we see things are different.”
In conclusion, she emphasized that in retrospect she would have preferred “not to leave the Jewish Home, not to establish the new right, in the first round, it was a political mistake, we represented a large public”, but she noted that “I held two very senior positions, minister of justice and minister of the interior, There is no other woman other than Tzipi Livni who held senior positions like me, I was in the political and security cabinet for six years, maybe Golda was also apart of me and Livni, you need to check. I had impressive achievements, I don’t enter into this comparison with Bennett of how we started and where we are today, I made a career Impressive, important things, as far as I’m concerned, I see it as a time-out, I’ll be back, I have a lot to contribute. I’m going to the private sector, I might combine private and public sectors, it’s a time-out from political life for a few years, it won’t hurt me to be with my family, downshift”.