Opinion: The prime minister’s complete silence over Likud minister Gila Gamliel’s lockdown breach and her lies about it proves once again that Benjamin Netanyahu is not even capable of keeping up the façade of true leadership
Forget pink slips or a public reprimand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not even capable of condemning his own minister’s dubious actions.
As far as Netanyahu is concerned, everything is either a political or a party issue.
When Blue & White Tourism Minister Asaf Zamir resigned from the government Friday, Netanyahu immediately lashed out at him via his spokesperson.
It is obvious that Zamir could no longer stomach the stench emanating from the government to which he belonged. He could not stand being part of an administration whose main issue is to make sure people do not protest its decisions.
They have dedicated all their energy to stop the demonstrations, while all around them the economy is collapsing, thousands blatantly ignore lockdown restrictions, and the number of coronavirus sick and dying continues to rise day by day.
But Zamir is no Gila Gamliel. He committed the most heinous crime by leaving a Netanyahu government – not the simple act of lying during an epidemiological investigation, attempting to hide the fact you skirted lockdown rules, drove 150 kilometers to visit family and ignored phone calls by health officials trying to reach you for hours.
As of Tuesday, 48 hours after her escapades were revealed, Netanyahu had yet to say a word about the scandal involving the environmental protection minister from his own party.
During a cabinet meeting Monday, set to extend those same regulations Gamliel violated, Netanyahu seemed pretty reconciled.
“I suggest we wait until the investigation is over,” the prime minister said.
Gamliel is a strong personality within Likud, and we must give her the respect she deserves – to hell with public trust and personal example.
After all, the minister has her constituents, the Likud is a family and one does not wash one’s dirty laundry in the open. As we all know, the Netanyahus would rather have that done on foreign soil.
One gets the strong sense that if this were someone else, former police chief Roni Alsheikh or Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit for example, Netanyahu would have been quick to condemn.
The prime minister has allowed thousands of coronavirus criminals to do as they please, leaving them unpunished as lockdown regulations become meaningless words on a piece of paper.
There is not enough ink or paper to write down all the scandals Netanyahu’s administrations had wrought.
How is it that a man who is so in love with appearing on prime-time TV with presentations and graphs is not able to utter one word to his minister who possibly broke every single lockdown restriction in the books.
With Gamliel, Netanyahu has proven that he is not even able to sustain the façade of real leadership.
Read more about: Coronavirus, COVID-19, Pandemics, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
