Netanyahu arms ISIS supporters; Rightwing ministers maintain surprising silence

Right-wing ministers are in shock. This morning's revelation by Yisrael Beiteinu chairman MK Avigdor Lieberman that Israel is arming gangs in the Gaza Strip caught the right-wing ministers in shock.

Representatives like Ben Gvir, Karchi and Smotrich, who are accustomed to tweeting angrily within minutes of every event, suddenly lost their Twitter passwords and shut off their microphones.

In the incident revealed this morning, after the censor blocked its publication for more than a month, there are two serious affairs.

The first is the very decision to transfer weapons to Arabs in Gaza. While this involves only light weapons, who can guarantee us that they won't be turned one day against IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens? The right established the principle "don't give them guns" during the Oslo days, when the Rabin government did exactly this thing and armed the Palestinian Authority so it would fight Hamas. Within 5 years, those weapons murdered Israeli citizens.

This time, Israel is betting on a Bedouin tribe, whose worldview is close to ISIS, just so it will fight the Islamic organization of Hamas and provide temporary quiet in the Gaza Strip.

But here comes the more serious incident – how such a dramatic decision of transferring ammunition and cooperating with Gazan forces is made without discussion, while bypassing the legal body that should manage the war – the political-security cabinet. Whether the decision is correct or not, such a strategic change in Israel's policy should receive approval from the elected level.

It appears that the right-wing ministers are in shock from the decision. Many of them tell reporters privately that they are still studying it. Meanwhile, they are maintaining media silence, perhaps on Netanyahu's orders or perhaps as an insult over not being included in the decision and therefore they don't feel the need to defend Netanyahu in this move.