Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who recently launched his new ‘Democratic Israel’ party ahead of the September elections, excoriated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Right on Sunday, accusing them of indulging in dangerous ‘messianism,’ citing the Gemara of the Shalosh Shavuos – the three oaths Hashem made in which He warned the Bnei Yisrael not to return to Eretz Yisrael until the coming of Mashiach.
Barak cited the Shalosh Shavuos in his more narrow criticism of the Israeli Right, while warning that Netanyahu and his allies were “straying” from the vision of Israel as a “Zionist, democratic, enlightened, liberal state.”
The path of “Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Rabin and Peres and everyone else – Netanyahu has strayed from that. The extreme right has pushed Israel towards the directions which the Talmud has already warned against, with two catastrophes that happened in history as a result of this kind of politics, with false messianism which tries to hasten the End [of Days] and give God a schedule for bringing the Messiah, which amounts to ‘storming the wall’, ‘provoking the nations of the world’ and spreads ‘baseless hatred’.”
“These three Talmudic prohibitions are violated every single day by people wearing kippot and priding themselves on their title of rabbis, but in fact, they falsify and distort Judaism, Zionism and Israelism.”
Read more at Arutz Sheva.
{Matzav.com}