Israel chief of staff under fire after meeting former defence minister

Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army Gadi Eizenkot came under fire yesterday after meeting the country’s former prime minister and defence minister Ehud Barak, Arab48 reported yesterday.

This came after Barak’s warned in a public meeting of disobedience among army leaders as a result of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, which have been leading to the one-state solution.

“The most right-wing government in history will cause civil opposition and disobeying of orders by senior IDF officers,” Times of Israel reported Barak saying at the annual Banana Festival in the occupied Jordan Valley.

Israeli political analyst Itamar Fleishman accused both men of conspiring to bring down Netanyahu. “There is no reason whatsoever that he went up to his apartment,” he said, according to Times of Israel. “I can’t understand how Eizenkot is still chief of staff after this meeting.”

Meanwhile, Amos Harel said in an op-ed published by Haaretz that the details of the meeting “leave one with an uneasy feeling.”

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The Israeli army denied that there was a hidden agenda for the meeting, which, according to an army spokesman, “was one of many routine meetings that the chief of staff has held since he entered the post with former chiefs of staff and senior reserve officers on a range of topics relating to the army and security.”

Barak has become an outspoken critic of Netanyahu and his government, accusing him of undermining the Zionist project.

In an op-ed published by the New York Times, he wrote that Netanyahu’s government had “declared war on the Supreme Court of Israel, the free press and civil society, as well as the Israel Defence Forces’ ethical code.”

He also said: “For all of Israel’s great achievements in its seven decades of statehood, our country now finds its very future, identity and security severely threatened by the whims and illusions of the ultra-nationalist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”