Meretz Party chairwoman Tamar Zandberg intends to help the Blue and White list establish a governing coalition, and pull the center-left list to the left, Zandberg said Sunday on the Israel Hayom-i24NEWS weekly election broadcast.
Zandberg attacked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for forcing a merger between Habayit Hayehudi-National Union and the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party and stressed that the move proved Meretz must be part of the next government.
“We will recommend any candidate—right now, it looks like it’s Benny Gantz together with Yair Lapid—who could form a center-left coalition, and we will be the left in that ‘center-left,’ ” Zandberg told Israel Hayom editor-in-chief Boaz Bismuth and anchor Nurit Ben.
“If he [Gantz] has a chance to form a government, we will recommend him, and we will definitely aspire to be a part of that coalition,” said Zandberg.
“You know that the best ministers of education came from my party, Meretz. If we have an opportunity to be in the Education Ministry, instead of [Naftali] Bennett … or [Bezalel] Smotrich or the Kahane Hai representatives [a reference to Otzma Yehudit], a terror organization that Prime Minister Netanyahu just helped bring into the Knesset that just got condemned by AIPAC, it would be to our advantage,” she added.
When asked whether she would try to encourage Arab voters to support Meretz in the election, Zandberg replied that her list intended to court Arab votes, and “we expect to gain support from [the] Arabs and Druze.”
In response to Zandberg’s remarks about Otzma Yehudit, party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir said, “It’s one thing for Tamar Zandberg to prostrate herself on the grave of [PLO founder] Yasser Arafat and get mixed up about who loves us and who is the enemy, but the problem with what she says is that she apparently doesn’t recognize the authority of the Supreme Court, which has discussed [activist] Baruch Marzel and Otzma Yehudit.”
