Environment Minister Gilad Erdan responded on Sunday to the remarks made over the weekend by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin.

Diskin attacked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak at an open forum in Kfar Saba and said he had “no confidence in the present leadership, which may have to lead us to an event on the scale of a war with Iran or a regional war.”

He said that Netanyahu Barak are “messianic” and “unfit to hold the reins of power. They give the public a false picture on the Iran question. They create the feeling that if Israel does not act, Iran will have a nuclear bomb, even though experts think that an attack on Iran will cause it to speed up the process of arming with nuclear weapons.”

Speaking during a panel in New York, Erdan criticized Diskin’s remarks and said, “The former heads of the security system should not harm the government´s efforts to destroy the Iranian threat. It is inconceivable that as the Prime Minister succeeds in putting together an international campaign to raise awareness about the Iranian threat and increase sanctions against it, all these former officials come out and hurt Israeli efforts to recruit the world against Iran by talking about what Israel can or cannot do.”

Erdan added that “if they did not believe in the head of the system, they could have resigned in real time.” He called on former Mossad head Meir Dagan, who came out with a statement of support for Diskin, and on Diskin himself to put their views forward as politicians for the public to elect.

In his remarks, Erdan also addressed the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and rejected the idea that they are an obstacle to achieving a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority.

“Israel was not established in order to build a Palestinian state and the settlements are no obstacle to peace,” he said. “There is no reason that a million Arabs will live in Israel and yet a Palestinian state will be free of Jews.” (IsraelNationalNews © 2012 04/30/12)