"The prime minister did not make a mistake" in cancelling his meeting with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, former minister Gideon Sa'ar said Wednesday at a seminar of the Center for National Security Studies at the University of Haifa..
In his lecture, Sa'ar addressed Israel's strategic challenges in the region, focusing on Israel's internal challenges as well.
"Unity is a value ... You can see what happens to companies that do not know how to contain the competing views within them ... Our unity has for years been an advantage and a strategic asset ... Today we feel the rifts expanding, the hatred spreading from the political system to the social media networks. There is an across-the-board tendency to define yourself by negating someone else.
"It is easier to say to whom I object instead of what I am for. I am very disturbed by this. It is dangerous, and it is the responsibility of the entire political system is to maintain unity," he said.
According to Sa'ar, the way to stop widening the rifts in Israeli society involves everyone - in the political system in particular and in the public in general - taking responsibility for his or her own discourse. "Whoever does not think like me is not the enemy, and sometimes it's easy to get a headline when you lash out at someone else, but that does not have to be the way."
In the political context, Saar said that "I belong to those who do not see the possibility of ending the conflict with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future." He added that "it is a mistake to enter a renewed political process based on the same outline that was tried and failed in the last 25 years," referring to a return to the pre-1967 Armistice Lines and the division of Jerusalem."
He said that among the possible solutions are those in which the surrounding countries participate in solutions, noting that a type of Palestinian Arab federation with Jordan is a possibility to be considered, or a tripartite program in which the Egyptians give the Palestinian Authority territories in the Sinai Peninsula in order to increase the territory of Gaza while Israel grants identical territories to Egypt.