Israeli Press
Yoram Cohen tells Eisenkot backers a Palestinian state is not relevant
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The former Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen, now a senior figure in Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party, told supporters that Palestinian statehood is off his agenda and that autonomy is the most Palestinians should expect.
Recordings of a parlour meeting Cohen held in Shoham for liberal religious-Zionist supporters reached Ynet, whose political correspondent Amir Ettinger published them on Sunday.
"A Palestinian state is not relevant," Cohen said in the recordings, adding that perhaps in the future "we could reach, at most, something called autonomy."
He was sharper about the service he once ran. "There are cracks we see today in the statehood of the organisation," he said of the Shin Bet under its current director, David Zini.
The danger, in his telling, is not Zini himself but pressure from the prime minister: a political echelon that asked the service to act illegally or unethically would be a very serious matter, and would hollow the organisation out from within through politicisation.
Cohen also said he hoped the next government would pass the law barring an indicted candidate from forming one, a measure blocked during the Bennett–Lapid years. He promised a cabinet of no more than 24 ministers and said he would weigh a minority government if the right would not give him 61 seats, while stepping around the question of governing with Ra'am.
Yashar leads or ties Likud in every recent seat projection. What its senior security voice offers Palestinians, on this record, stops short of a state.
