Blue and White’s Yaalon: We Need to Do Better With Chareidim

If Blue and White as a party hoped to do better the second time around, it needed to do something to repair its relationship with chareidim, party MK Moshe Yaalon said. Speaking to Reshet Bet, Yaalon said that the party realized that this was the reason it had been unable to establish a coalition after the March elections.

Yaalon is number three on the Blue and White list. The problem for the party has been its number two, Yair Lapid, with whom chareidi parties said they would not work with in any coalition. Blue and White got 35 seats in the just-dispersed Knesset, as did the Likud, and given the constellation of parties Blue and White head might not have been able to gather 61 MKs in a coalition under any circumstances – but a coalition was a nonstarter without the possibility of bringing United Torah Judaism and Shas into it.

Yaalon did not address the Lapid issue directly in the interview, but said that “I cannot accept the basic premise that we cannot reach a result that will allow us to set up a coalition. We will arrive at a situation in which everyone, including the chareidim, understand that we will be establishing the coalition.”

Meanwhile, it appeared Thursday that Yair Lapid was not the only political leader on the chareidi “no go” list. In an interview with Army Radio, United Torah Judaism MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni said that he had had enough of Avigdor Liberman’s antics. “Liberman the dictator decided he wanted to bring ‘order’ to the country. He will decide which law passes, how it will pass, if there will be elections, and when they will take place. He is an irresponsible person and the public will not forgive him. He will not pass the electoral threshold in the next election, and if he does I will recommend to my colleagues that we do not join a coalition that his party is a member of,” Rabbi Gafni said.