Moshe Feiglin on Kan Israel Radio: Role-Confusion Plagues Israel’s Decision Making Process

Israel’s news company Kan reported this week how the defense establishment ignored policy decisions dictated by Israel’s elected officials regarding Syria’s planned nuclear reactor. As a former member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Moshe Feiglin was interviewed on Yaakov Eichler’s radio show and shared his first-hand experience with his listeners:

“When, during the Protective Edge Campaign in Gaza, I announced that I opposed sending infantry into Gaza because the campaign did not have a clear goal – my statement was met with the blank stares of the generals and complacence of the other members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

When I asked today’s Chief of Staff, who was then Deputy Chief of Staff – after a month and a half of missiles on Tel Aviv and 70 IDF fatalities in battles in the alleys of Gaza – “Who is the enemy?”, he could not answer me.

The ongoing erosion in the status of Israel’s elected officials has created a situation in which the defense establishment has begun to forget who works for whom.

Israel’s Attorney General, who currently refuses to represent the government in the High Court, exemplifies this role-confusion.

Recently, we have learned that when the Prime Minister ordered Chief of Staff Ashkenazi and Mossad Chief Dagan to prepare an attack on Iran, they refused. Mossad Chief Pardo also boasts that he refused to carry out a similar order. It is no wonder, then, that when Israel’s elected officials in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee warned that Syria was building a nuclear reactor, the defense establishment ridiculed them. This was the worst security fiasco in Israel’s history.

We must put the unelected bodies in Israel’s leadership in their place and remind them that the sovereign is the nation – by means of its elected officials. Generals and legal authorities who do not understand their station, must be promptly dismissed“.