Opposition leader: PM ignored ‘all red flags’ before Oct. 7, should have resigned on Oct. 8. Says Israel ‘can be what we were supposed always to be: happy, optimistic, functional’
Sam Sokol and David Horovitz August 25, 2024
Given all of Israel’s problems, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid is surprisingly optimistic.
Meeting with The Times of Israel in his Yesh Atid party’s headquarters on the second story of a modest low-rise Tel Aviv office block on Thursday, the centrist former prime minister positioned himself as the leader of a democratic movement straddling the middle ground between the country’s two historic political traditions — the left-wing Labor Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and the liberal nationalism of Menachem Begin’s Revisionists. Indeed, he has placed pictures of both of those iconic prime ministers on his office wall.
Despite the deep divisions generated first by the government’s judicial overhaul plan, then by the failure to thwart Hamas’s October 7 invasion and slaughter, and now by nearly a year of fighting in the Gaza Strip, the anguish over the 109 hostages still held captive there, and relentless conflict in the country’s north, Lapid believes that Israeli politics are no longer defined by a rivalry between left and right, but rather by a conflict over the country’s very identity as a democracy. He is adamant that he represents a majority large enough to win back power when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly fractious coalition falls. And he believes this will happen soon.
“We have to be able to remember that there is another option to what is going on right now: We” — that is, Israel — “can be what we were supposed always to be. We can be happy, we can be optimistic, we can be hopeful. We can be functional — which we are not right now,” he elaborated as he leaned back in a chair in his office, a yellow hostage ribbon pinned to a suit jacket worn over a t-shirt and above black jeans.
You know what? He lost his soul. Can you say soulless? So he’s soulless.
“We can have great relations with the international community. We can restart the economy. The only thing is we need management that is functional in order to come back to our roots, which is an optimistic, original, and smart nation in so many ways,” said Lapid, who was prime minister from July-December 2022 before the collapse of his and Naftali Bennett’s government. Further stressing the glass half full, he added, is that Israel is “lucky enough” to be witnessing a US presidential campaign “in which the two candidates are great friends of Israel.”
But first, he believes, Netanyahu has got to go. Indeed, Lapid stressed, the prime minister should have resigned on October 8, because “all the signs, all the red flags, all the warnings” were there for him to see. Netanyahu, charges Lapid, had been briefed on the looming dangers. “And he ignored them all. This is why it wouldn’t have happened on our shift — and this is why he shouldn’t have been prime minister since October 8.”
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