From Gush Shalom
I HAVE a confession to make: I don't hate Binyamin Netanyahu. I don't hate Sara'le either.
I generally don't hate people. With the sole exception of people who have betrayed the trust I put in them and tried to stick a knife in my back. Not more than three or four in all my life. I am not going to name them.
I have not met Netanyahu on a private basis more than two or three times.
Once, he introduced me to his second wife in the Knesset corridor. She seemed to me a nice young woman.
The second time we met at a photographic exhibition, in which there was a photo of me wearing a pilot's helmet. (Don't know how and why).
"You look like Errol Flynn," he told me. I had never seen an Errol Flynn movie, but took it as a compliment.
We had, of course, many arguments in the Knesset, but that doesn't count.
Therefore, if I want to remove Netanyahu from the government, and as soon as possible, it is not because of any personal feelings. I just believe that he is a disaster for Israel.
The endless cases of bribery that have surfaced -- and continue to surface, like submarines -- necessitate his removal at once. And we have not yet even reached the affair of the German-built submarines, which promises many new revelations. As a former editor of a news-magazine that specialized in investigations of corruption affairs, I can smell it.
A lot of people would enjoy seeing "Bibi" in prison. I would not. If it were up to me, the President of State and the Attorney General would offer him a Nixon-style deal: resign immediately and be pardoned five minutes later. You and your wife. No case, no trials. Go home and enjoy life.
There is no financial problem. Netanyahu is a rich man, with a generous pension as a former Prime Minister, with several luxury apartments, quite apart from the huge bribes he seems to have pocketed along the way.
Also, every publisher in the world would gladly pay a big advance for his memoirs.
So there is no reason to pity him.
TROUBLE IS, who will take his place?
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