Yashar lawmaker Elyasaf Peretz will leave the Knesset if his party forms a coalition with an Arab party, his mother, Miriam Peretz, told Kol Barama radio on Thursday.
“It will not happen that an Arab party decides whether to go to war,” Miriam Peretz told the Haredi station.
She said heavy pressure was being put on the two of them to defect from Gadi Eisenkot’s party.
Peretz’s comments echo a pledge her son made in an Israel Hayom interview before the Oct. 27 election. “I, Elyasaf Peretz, say: We don’t sit with non-Zionist parties,” he declared in August.
The lawmaker said at the time that Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas is not a Zionist and “couldn’t even condemn Hamas.”
“The world can turn over a hundred times, I won’t let it happen,” Peretz vowed.
Israel Prize laureate Miriam Peretz, who ran for president of Israel in 2021, lost two of her sons, Uriel and Eliraz, while they were serving in the Israel Defense Forces.
Her eldest son, Staff Sgt. Uriel Peretz, was killed in 1998 at the age of 22 during an ambush in Southern Lebanon. Her second son, Maj. Eliraz Peretz, was killed in a Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack while serving on the Gaza Strip border in March 2010.
