Israeli voices which oppose the new Israeli government are rising in the Zionist entity, with envoy to Canada preparing to step down and a legal adviser warning against moves in the West Bank.
Israeli media reported that Ronen Hoffman, the Israeli Ambassador to Canada announced Saturday that he would be stepping down from his position rather than staying on and serving under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new hardline government.
A former MK in Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, Hoffman tweeted, “With the transition to the new government and to different policy in Israel, my personal and professional integrity has compelled me to request to shorten my post and return to Israel this summer.”
He said he would stay on until a replacement is appointed later this year, The Times of Israel reported.
Hoffman became the second ambassador appointed by the previous Israeli government led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid to make a resignation announcement “tied to ideological disagreements with the new coalition,” widely seen as the most right-wing in the Zionist entity’s history.
Israeli Ambassador to France Yael German was the first to do on the day Netanyahu’s government was sworn in.
Legal Adviser Warns against Israeli Moves in W.B.
For his part, a former legal adviser to the Israeli defense establishment warned against legislation Netanyahu’s government intends to pass, saying it would harm the Zionist entity’s security and open it up to potential international scrutiny.
In an interview with The Times of Israel last week, Ahaz Ben-Ari, who served as the Defense Ministry’s legal adviser between 2007 and 2017, said that the government’s plan to restructure military authority in the West Bank as part of a new office within the Defense Ministry given to Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, would not only breach the law as it stands but would damage security.
Under coalition agreements, control over the appointment of several army generals and authority over a Defense Ministry unit that oversees Israeli policy in the West Bank would be taken away from the defense minister and handed to Smotrich.
Additionally, the far-right leader of the Otzma Yehudit party has been seeking to grant soldiers immunity from criminal prosecution for any action they might take while on operational duty.
Source: Israeli media
