Feiglin draws Churchill comparison
“Israel Chose Dishonor to Avoid War — Now It Will Have Both”
“We chose to contain the most terrible pogrom since the Holocaust, perpetrated by Islamist Nazism within our borders, and to negotiate with it instead of wiping it off the face of the earth. And we will all pay the price”
Former MK and Zehut party leader Moshe Feiglin delivered a fierce critique of Israel’s decision to approve the hostage-release deal, calling it “a stinging national defeat” and likening it to the appeasement of Nazi Germany before World War II.
Quoting Winston Churchill’s response to the 1938 Munich Agreement, Feiglin wrote: “You chose dishonor to avoid war; you will have both dishonor and war.”
He said that while the return of hostages is “an enormous human moment,” the moral satisfaction does not erase what he called “a humiliating failure of national will.”
“We chose to contain the most terrible pogrom since the Holocaust, perpetrated by Islamist Nazism within our borders, and to negotiate with it instead of wiping it off the face of the earth. And we will all pay the price,” Feiglin said.
He predicted that, as with previous deals, “nothing beyond the release of hostages, the release of terrorists, and the withdrawal of the IDF will actually happen. Hamas will remain in control, and the agreement will not be worth the paper it’s written on.”
Feiglin contrasted the courage of Israeli soldiers on the battlefield with what he described as the cowardice of their political leadership:
“Our heroic soldiers ran first into the fire and tried to achieve victory in the name of the nation. But there can be no victory for a nation led without vision, a nation desperate to please the cheering crowd.”
Turning to the broader strategic picture, Feiglin warned that Israel’s regional enemies are “waiting for their opportunity to strike,” listing Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Bedouin tribes, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.
“In the Middle East, either you sit at the table or you are part of the menu. Today, we all became the menu,” he wrote.
He concluded with a call for a new kind of national leadership:
“The generation of heroism deserves leadership with vision, leadership that will address Israel’s strategic vulnerabilities and turn it into a regional Jewish-Israeli power, one that no organization or nation will dare to harm.”
Feiglin’s statement, shared on his official X account, resonated widely among right-wing and nationalist commentators who see the deal as a moral and strategic humiliation.