Following reports of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's plan to approve hundreds of new housing units in the West Bank before considering a brief settlement freeze, opposition leader Tzipi Livni said on Friday that the government did not know where is was headed and was playing a dangerous game of trying to please everyone.
"Israel's leaders, the elected government, in my opinion, still hasn't made a choice between two different outlooks. One, Jewish existence in every part of Israel, and two, the existence of a Jewish democratic state," she said in a speech at an IDF pensioners' event.
"In the absence of such a decision and vision, the government doesn't have the ability to take the correct measures, and so it finds all sorts of processes that may keep it in power, but it's not clear what direction it wants to take," she continued.
"Today it reached is peak - building and freezing. 'We'll build now and freeze later, in the meantime we'll build, and afterwards we'll freeze,' or all sorts of strange ideas of this nature that stem from the fact that actually, this government doesn't know where it wants to go, and so it's trying to please everyone - those outside a little, these here a little by building now - but the result is very bad in my eyes."
MK Ophir Paz-Pines (Labor) said that the "plan to approve the building of hundreds of units effectively annuls the freeze."
"This is about two moves that cancel out one another, and it shows that Netanyahu is trying to eat the cake and leave it whole," he said in statement. "He should just be careful that it doesn't get stuck in his throat."
He said issuing new building permits was "unnecessary and damaging."
"I fear that issuing new permits will foil the next step - a settlement freeze that would build confidence and allow negotiations to resume," he said.
Also Friday, Government Services Minister Michael Eitan stressed the importance of Likud unity after more than half of the faction accepted an invitation to speak at Wednesday's hawkish rally in favor of expanding settlements amid the reports of a planned freeze.
"The Likud faction is united regarding everything that concerns the Jewish people's right to the territory of the land of Israel, although there are different evaluations on the scope that the government and its leader have to exercise this right," he said in a statement. "But past experience proves definitively that any division, rebellion or split leads to the fall of governments of the nationalistic camp, which support settlement in Judea and Samaria, and brings about governments interested in wiping this camp out."
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