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9 hours ago
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While Yossi Cohen stated in the podcast that he would consider running for prime minister, Walla's June polls found that his party would not receive enough mandates to pass the electoral threshold.
Former Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen said on Tuesday that he should become Israel's prime minister, adding that he would bring "any real change" in a podcast interview with Yasmin Lukatz.
During the interview, he explained that "any real change could only come if [he] became prime minister," adding that when a date for elections is announced, he would consider running.
He added that his family urges him to run, although he had told Lukatz that they had previously advised him to avoid politics.
Notably, Walla published a poll in June that found that a hypothetical party headed by Cohen would only get four mandates, which is falling below Israel's electoral threshold.
Three of those mandates would come from the Change Bloc, comprised of Naftali Bennett's party, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid, and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu. Cohen would also receive just one mandate from the Likud.
Former Mossad head Yossi Cohen is seen speaking at the Jerusalem Post annual conference at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, on October 12, 2021 (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Would Cohen's party survive an election?
Cohen, who served as head of the Mossad from 2016 to 2021, has notably spent recent months supporting the families of hostages and defending their right to demonstrate.
In a June interview with Channel 12, he said that he believed that "it’s not the time to replace the government, but after the war, ‘a big change is needed here."
He was once considered an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but has recently broken with him on several fronts, including issues with judicial overhaul and his unwillingness to end the war to achieve the return of more hostages at an earlier date.
Cohen has been either the best-known or among the best-known Mossad chiefs in history due to his role in the agency’s heist of Iran’s nuclear archives in 2018, reports of the Mossad’s sensational destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities in 2020-2021, and his role in the Abraham Accords in 2020, much of which was unusually made public.
Until Cohen’s term, the Mossad tended to carry out its intelligence and spying activities more in the shadows.
Yonah Jeremy Bob contributed to this report.
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