Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid first responded to the dramatic retirement announcement of coalition chairman Idit Silman, 36 hours after she submitted the letter to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
In a post on Facebook, he wrote, among other things: "Everything will be done so that a government will continue for a long time ... Extremism will not defeat the State of Israel. Ben Gvir and Smutrich will not take our country from us by force, corruption will not defeat sanity and clean hands. Making us hate and get angry with each other will always lose in the end. "
"Ten months ago, we proved that it is possible otherwise," reads the full post of the foreign minister.
"The great achievement was not that we formed a government that no one believed we could form. It was the moment when the State of Israel discovered that people with different views - right, center and left - want and can gather around a common good. This is the idea around which our government was formed: we can live here together .
"Extremism will not defeat the State of Israel. Ben Gvir and Smutrich will not take our country from us by force of arms, corruption will not defeat sanity and clean hands. Whoever tries to separate us, make us hate and be angry with each other, will always lose in the end.
"These days we are dealing with a not-so-simple coalition crisis. It is not the first and probably not the last. I have spoken in the last two days with all the party leaders more than once, and they are all mobilized so that we can get through it without further shocks.
"Everything is being done to keep the government going for a long time to come. Everything is being done not to degenerate the country into further, toxic and divisive elections. Everything is being done to continue the economic growth and political boom of recent months.
"We are determined to prove that a large majority of Israelis are not willing to hate each other. True Israeli patriots do not drag their country to extremism and violence. They do not want to get rid of anyone who thinks differently from them, but to find ways to live with it. That our right to exist is only together. "
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