Additional difficulties in forming the government: After prime minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu informed President Herzog yesterday that he had “come up with him”, it seemed that the road to the formation of the new government had finally been paved. However, Finance Committee Chairman Moshe Gafni sent a sharp letter to Netanyahu this evening (Thursday), in which he demands that the coalition agreement be reopened, claiming that the agreements reached were only with Agudat Israel, and not with the entire faction.
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“Since knowing the results of the elections according to which it is possible for you to form a stable government headed by you consisting of parties that value the Jewish identity of the State of Israel and that you will faithfully serve all the citizens of the State of Israel wherever they are, we Knesset members of Degel Torah have engaged in intensive and substantive negotiations in the last two months for the purpose of establishing the government quickly the possible,” was written at the beginning of the letter.
Debate in the Finance Committee, Moshe Gafni responds to the decision to establish the Reforms Committee. Photography” Knesset channel
He further added that “when Degel Torah did not even condition its signature on the replacement of the Speaker of the Knesset on the progress of the negotiations, even though important issues from our point of view were not yet ripe for understanding, so we acted from a responsible attitude throughout the ongoing negotiations. We conducted the negotiations together with our partners from Agudat Israel as we have always done, and although differences of opinion often arose between us and Agoi on various points, we made every effort on our part to come together as one bloc and with one goal, when sometimes we agreed on things even though we were not comfortable with them.
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He mentioned the Torah flag’s reluctance to sign issues that Agudat Israel opposes, and attacked: “When Likud representatives approached us with a request for a signature on the Speaker of the Knesset without AGUI representatives, we therefore refused. We were surprised to hear that yesterday a coalition agreement was signed by Agudat Israel, and all this despite that fundamental issues that were between us have not yet been discussed and we have not come to an agreement on them! Apart from this, we have “discovered” appendices that were attached to the signed agreement, including things that we objected to during the negotiations, and even positions and memberships in the bodies that we have received from them to this day as always as instructed by our masters. This separate signing has a lot of meaning!”.
Gafni demanded that the coalition agreement be reopened: “Therefore, in the opinion of our gentlemen, Lithuania demands that negotiations be reopened that will also include issues raised by Degel Torah representatives in the negotiations and that we agreed to certain wordings due to the necessity of our partnership with AGOI, even though our opinion was different.”
Among the issues he wants to reopen: an amendment to the security service law concerning the regulation of the status of yeshiva members and the issue of housing in the ultra-orthodox public. At the end he wrote: “Since we all wish to reach as quickly as possible the establishment of a stable government with a solid majority, therefore we request to immediately enter into negotiations between the Likud and the Torah Banner Party.”