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Thoughtful debate elevates us all. Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain revive the Jewish art of constructive discussion on topics related to political and social trends in Israel, Israel-Diaspora relations, and the collective consciousness of being Jewish.
The podcast draws its name from the concept of machloket l’shem shemayim, “disagreeing for the sake of heaven” and is part of the Institute’s iEngage Project.
A Conversation with Yair Lapid Transcript
Louis:Hi I’m M. Louis Gordon, Producer for Heaven’s Sake. We’re bringing you a special episode while Donniel and Yossi are away this week. It’s a conversation we’ve recorded back in early July during the Hartman Institute’s Community Leadership Program, a week-long study seminar we do every year where leaders and learners from around the world convene on our campus in Jerusalem and tackle the most pressing challenges that face Jewish life today.
There on July 3rd, Donniel Hartman sat down with Yair Lapid, the former journalist and Prime Minister, and currently the leader of the opposition in the Israeli Knesset. They discuss the urgent issues at play in Israeli politics and society through the lens of liberal Jewish values. Amidst external threats and an ongoing war, how does Israel build peace with its neighbors or an inclusive society for all its citizens? How can Israel pursue defeating Hamas while also bringing our hostages home safely? And what role might political centrism play? It’s shaping public life for Israelis.
The audio from this live recording is a little rougher than usual. Our editor did a heroic job of cleaning up what he could. Nevertheless, we think this is a conversation that you won’t want to miss. Here’s Donniel Hartman and Yair Lapid at the Community Leadership Program in Jerusalem.
Donniel: Hi everyone. It’s always complicated, not life, we decide who do we want to invite? Which politicians do we want to invite? How do we embody the pluralistic spirit and the multiple voices of the Hartman Institute? So our guest today made it easy.
First, he’s the head of the opposition. So that position lets it be larger and he would be a natural, but I’ll tell you, just don’t share it with anybody, he’s one of my favorite Israeli politicians.
Yair: Thank you.
Donniel: But, and I want to tell you why I could give you a long list. But I want to tell you just a few. You know, we’re so used to being cynical. Sitting here, Yair Lapid is a politician who, before he entered into politics, spent years thinking and developing positions, which he would stand for. He was a politician who entered Israeli politics because he had a vision and an idea, and he stood for something. And just that idea that you study before you enter politics, you don’t enter politics and then say, what do people want of me, but it’s rather, what is it that I want to bring to Israeli society?
The second is I think more than anybody else, Yair is responsible for the fact that in Israeli political life, we have a category called the center, and it was an ideological center. It’s not like I’m not right, I’m not left. There’s an ideology behind it. And given the complexity of Israeli struggles and challenges to be forced into dichotomies is to be forced into very often prisons, boxes, and mediocrity, and the idea that there is a center. You know, there were attempts before, but you now, now you have competition as to who’s the center. Everybody wants to be the center now. But the third thing for which all of Israeli society is always going to be in your debt. You are a politician who’s willing to compromise your own personal political well being for the sake of the people
Over and again, over and again. We need a new configuration. You take the first place. We need to create a coalition government. You only have six seats. How many did you have?
Yair: 17 at the time.
Donniel: You could be prime minister first. Like, nobody does that in Israel. You don’t do that. What you’re supposed to believe is that your well-being is the well-being of the country. And that is kind of frightening. And when there is a politician, who it doesn’t matter if you agree with everything or not. I don’t even agree with myself tomorrow. That’s not what it’s, that’s not what it’s about. But when you have a politician who says that my political life is about service, it’s about being a shaliach tzibbur, and who doesn’t just say it, but proves it to his own detriment, that is a politician that I’m honored to bring to the Hartman Institute.
Yair: Thank you so much. Thank you. I don’t want to say anything because there’s no way on earth I’m going to beat the introduction.
Donniel: So I’ll talk now. And the reason why they’re laughing is they know I wasn’t joking. So I’m going to ask you some questions about, this is a group of people who’ve just spent eight days, literally day and night talking about what Israel means to them. And the theme of our conference is Israel Tomorrow. And I want to start with that. What is your vision of Israel tomorrow? Leaving aside the small detail of the fact that we have to change the government. Leaving that aside, let’s not get into that. Because that’s self-evident that that’s what you want to do and many, many of us, the majority of Israelis do. What do you believe are the major challenges and obstacles? We’ll talk about the war later, but there is, there is life after the war. Yeish Yisrael shel machar, an Israel tomorrow. What are the great challenges that you feel that our society faces? Pick two or three. I know you can do 20, but pick three.
Yair: Well, I think we have a major challenge that is already on the go, which is a great thing, which is to change the fundamental argument that we are having or the fundamental discussion we’re having from the discussion between right and left to the discussion between liberals and conservatives. And part of the reason I am still an optimist, because we, I think we all spend, I don’t know, six months being the most depressing thing on earth, which is sad optimists.
But now there’s the, there’s this, the beginning of the rebound and what is happening because of the war, because of what was known as a judicial reform before the judicial revolution, people tend to look at the basic discussion or discourse in Israel in a different manner. And the depth of this discussion is different and therefore the results can be more fundamental.
And this is where we’re pushing, because you’re asking me a question about the future reality of the state of Israel. Part of what I do and part of what I always believed in is that reality is not something that is happening to you. This is something that you create. This is a very Jewish way of looking at life, and this is also a very political way of looking at it. This new discussion between liberals and conservatives is different from the one that we have before. First and maybe foremost, because it’s not a cynical one, it goes into the depth of what it is that is concerning us.
You are right about what you said about the center. The center is not the middle. People tend to confuse it, thinking that the center is being in the middle. I went to the gay parade here in Jerusalem a few weeks ago. So, there was the gay parade on one side. And there was the goons of Ben Gvir on the other side demonstrating against the gateway. There is no middle between those two. We know where we are, right? And we are on the liberal side. And the fact that people are now discussing what are liberal causes — what is it that we have to do as liberals? What is it that we are fighting for as liberals? It’s very encouraging.
And through that, you can have the other conversations to address the other topics that are necessary or that has become a necessity. Palestinians. Yes, there is such a thing called Palestinians that we need to, it’s a problem we have to address.
Donniel: I’m going to ask you details about that soon.
Yoav: Okay. And if I’m going to be asked, I will stick to the higher flow for a second. What is centrism? Centrism is the understanding that there are fundamental contradictions in life. Free market and the need to help the weak. Religion-state in Israel. Jewish and democratic. Security and civil rights. These are contradictions. The people who love security will tell you, let’s throw to jail, every, we just had the discussion last Knesset, they’re saying, well, we can’t just throw them to jail because they’re Arabs, can’t we? Because it’s security. We say, no, no, no, no. You can’t. Still, you want to make sure that people are alive. This is part of what the government needs, is supposed to take care of, and ours didn’t.
Those contradictions, and the endless negotiation between those contradictions is centrism, is the job of centrism. This is why centrism is not a position. It’s an act. We’ve discussed, we’ve mentioned when we were sitting, before coming here, Rabbi Heschel, who, after the famous march from Selma to Montgomery, he marched with Martin Luther King and he went back home and he wrote in his diary, my feet were praying today. Centrism says, I pray with my feet. I go and do stuff. And I think right now people are willing to address the problems.
And I will add only one thing to this during the judicial reform or revolution, when we weren’t demonstrating at the beginning of it, we were sitting in my office and other offices, asking ourselves, how the hell are we going to explain to the people something as complicated, for example, as the probability cause is? I mean, this is so complicated and detailed. And then we took to the streets and we think, we realized they already knew, they educated themselves because it was important to their lives.
So now I think after the horror of October the 2nd, after the horror of this year and a half of this government, people are saying we are not going to be defeated by ignorance. We’re not going to be defeated by the fact that they’re going to control the details that we are not aware of. We’re going to use institutions like this one in order to educate ourselves, and we’re going to be out there and know better than they do what is it that is right for the country.
Donniel: Let’s take that as an example, because I also felt that last year was a remarkable year where the right-left was always about security or land and which politician you hated and which one, which one screwed your ancestors or did what, or with every like there was some, there’s always a cheshbon, and you, I could only be here or there, and people started to march and the marches started at a fear. They’re taking away from me, my democracy. They’re going to change some of the core safeties that give me life.
But as the demonstrations continued, and you described it as a process of education, people started to talk about human rights. They started to talk about, what does democracy mean? And you had, you spoke about women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and state and religion, and they even started to talk about Israeli-Palestinians. And on the periphery, there was always the occupation, but people actually started to engage, and the demonstrations weren’t just what we were against or fear. It started with Yariv Levin, “kan ze lo Polin,” you know, it’s like all these statements, we’re not Poland, we’re not Hungary, we’re not this. And then it became a demonstration about what we want to be.
I’ve been going to the demonstrations, the new ones. You haven’t found the vision. The demonstrations are very much against, against, against. There’s a fear component. How do we shift it to something more noble? Because at the end, fear will get people out and I know there’s a whole debate amongst the organizers. Yes, fear is the great motivator, but I think for Jews, you need inspiration.
And so as, when I’m asking you about what you’re saying, the inspiration is how do we reclaim a centrist conversation post October 7th, how do we do that? What’s going to be the slogans that you as a politician, you don’t just run a party. You have a vision. What could we hope for instead of just what are we against?
Yair: I disagree with the premise.
Donniel: Fair enough.
Yair: Whoever take to the street is actually making an act of hope because he believes he can change reality. Otherwise we would have stayed home. The people I fear the most are the people who stay home and says, it’s not going to happen.
Now here is the communicator or the politician in me now. Every election in the history of democracies is always about the same thing. Fear against hope? Fear usually wins. I would say three out of four times, few will win hope. The next election, hope is going to win. Why? Because we have now an interesting combination of hope and rage.
Rage is not a bad thing. If you want to make people more active, if you’re into it, you have to be careful. You have to be careful. There’s something addictive to it. There’s something tendentious in rage because it’s, it’s so narrow-minded in ways. So you have to find the right moment to translate the rage into hope. But this is the time in which people are going to say, okay, we are here now because we have decided, and you know what, I’m polling this because this is what I do, and this is, it’s going to win the next election.
And it’s going to win the election, next election, which is even more surprising and profound at the same time because of the right reasons, because people understand what went wrong. And they’re talking about things they never talked about before, like efficiency, for example, functional government, for example, the idea that somebody is actually running your life right now, we are in a situation in which, if we will get up in the morning tomorrow and there will be, I don’t know, no traffic lights, we won’t be surprised because nothing works. So, okay. Here’s another thing that we, we, we just, yeah. So there is,
Donniel: They will work, by the way, in the neighborhoods that supported certain parties.
Yair: Yeah. The one thing, this is the one thing they still know how to do, which is transferring the money to the friends. A side of this, not. So this, this has become a thing. And again, I’m polling this, this has become a thing also for the people who used to say, well, this is not an issue.
On the other hand, there is another group of people, and this is another reason why to be hopeful that had a reminder, you know, it’s not even a reminder. They’ve come to realize that there are more liberals than they thought. This is not the right group to discuss this maybe, but think of it this way. The female Likud voter from Ashdod, she has a gay nephew in her Shabbat dinner and she likes it. And all of a sudden she has a government that she voted for that tells her that she’s supposed to throw him out of the room. She doesn’t accept this. For the first time in years, she heard about it because this government is so extreme because they were pushing this envelope in a way that was so shameless.
If you’re asking me, I think what we need to do, there will be a moment there. It’s a graduating process that will become a moment. Right now every week I’m going either to the hostage square in Tel Aviv or to other places, every week they tell me, how come people are not coming? And I’m asking them, are there more people this week than the week before? And they said, yeah, yeah, there are more people, but how come the others? And I said, so this is the way it is. There was not a single civil rights fight in the history of the world that was easy. It is never easy.
I saw recently a documentary about the way Lyndon B. Johnson is inheriting the civil rights bill that he doesn’t want because it’s southern, and then, then he’s pushing it and pushing it, and then it happens with, by the way, the dirtiest possible politics. As did Lincoln with the manifesto against slavery. So it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be long. It’s going to be longer than you think. It’s going to be more difficult than you think. And it’s going to happen. Because there’s no way on earth to stop a group of people who really believe in what they’re doing and they have the right idea. And this is us.
Donniel: Let me shift to something that Israelis don’t like to talk about, not including you. We love to pretend as if the status quo in Judea and Samaria, forget Gaza, could remain forever. And along comes President Biden, who actually from the war in Gaza says there’s a possibility for a new future. Most Israelis, and if you’re polling them and I’m reading the polls, can’t even enter into the conversation. We haven’t had a conversation, a serious one in Israel for almost 20 years. After we believe that we offered and they said, no, you said a plague on all your houses. My job is to go on with my life. I’ll build fences and walls and whatever it might be. And if it doesn’t work, so here in Gaza, it didn’t work, but at the end of the day, I have no fear.
We don’t even think in those terms about a future with Palestinians. Yet the world, our best friend in the world, Biden, the administration, the Saudis. The international community is not going to want this. The status quo is not going to be allowed to continue. And there’s positions and visions being offered and Israeli society is not even in the conversation. They don’t even know how to assimilate it. They don’t even know what to do with it because we offered, they said no, and they still want to kill us. But the world is saying we need a new future.
How do you relate to this language? Do you embrace it? What do you think we should do? Cause it’s going to require serious changes. Are we going to be at one with the world or are we going to be Am Levadad Yishkon? Are we going to be sticking down and saying, we know Hamas, that peace is not possible? And the rest of the world is moving. Could we enter into, could we embrace that vision? Could you embrace that vision?
Yair: Am Levadad Yishkon is Balak, who was a non-Jew. We are now importing prophets.
Donniel: Always.
Yair: You take what you can get, you know. If we will be, if we will be Am Levadad Yishkon, we will not be,
Donniel: A nation that dwells apart.
Yair: We will not be, there is no such thing. I’m starting with this because this is essential for the continuation, not as a way of dodging the question, because I want to answer the question, but I won’t. We have now a government that tells us, I’m quoting this is not, you know, it’s not a hint or anything. They say you have to speak the language of the Middle East. If you wanna win this war, you have to do, the owner of the house is crazy,”ba’al habayit mishtagea.” But we have to deal with them in a way they understand.
If we will speak the language of the Middle East, we will lose. It’s a defeat to Hamas. This is what they want. They want us to be like them because this is the only war they can win. If we will be as ignorant as them, as extreme as them, as deprived as them, then they will win the war. The only way we can win long-term In this neighborhood is being Western, modern, democratic society.
We have kept telling the world in the last 76 years is two things. We said we are the strongest country in the Middle East and we are the only democracy in the Middle East. But we, apparently the government tend to forget these two has to do with each other. We are the strongest country in the Middle East because we are the only democracy in the Middle East.
There is another theory, which is almost as hazardous. And this is the villa in the jungle thing. And this is like so many other issues. This is something that Ehud Barak invented and Bibi has adopted, which is the most toxic possibility. Who has a villa in the jungle? Leopold, the King of Belgium has a villa in the jungle. This serves all those people who are saying that we are colonialists. I am not a villa in the jungle. I am from here. I am from this city. I am from this land. I am part of the Middle East, but I am the best part of the Middle East because I’m a democracy. This is the framework.
We need to separate from the Palestinians, not because we’re doing them a favor, not because this is something we need for them. I don’t care about them. We need to do it because of us. We need to do it because it’s the best way for us to stay the only democracy in the Middle East.
Donniel: Can I stop you there for a second?
Yair: Yeah, sure.
Donniel: Why is it that we have to say that?
Yair: Say what?
Donniel: That I don’t care about that.
Yair: Because I care, you know, I care more about us.
Donniel: That’s fair enough. Care, that you care more about you. But in Israel, I’m with you because in order to make, you have to say that for Israel, but why do we have to say, why can’t we say they’re human beings too? I’m at war with them. I care about me. But why do I have to say, I don’t, I don’t care about that. I’m like, why is that such a given? Even from a centrist? Why do we need to do that?
Yair: Because we are angry and rightly so. Because it was polled. Here’s the difference maybe between you and I, I saw the last poll from Shikaki about what people in the West Bank think about what happened on October 7th. And 78 percent of them say, well, we fully agree. This was, this is great. We really like it. So I’m angry with them. But being angry is not a policy.
Donniel: I’m angry too.
Yair: Not enough, apparently.
Donniel: I’m not going to go toe to toe when I know I’m going to lose. The reason why I complimented you at the beginning was to protect myself. Wes says the same thing, you know. The question is not how angry you are. The question is whether we can adopt a language that’s worthy of us. And we could say we’re angry, you could say both. But leave that aside. Go on back to, I just, just put it somewhere. Can we, and if we’re ever going to, because at the end of the day, when Biden presents his plan, and we, at the consensus, Israelis, we don’t care about you. How do you ever really move and do something which is going to involve them and their rights, when our default is, I don’t care about, it’s a difference, I’m angry at you, I’m mmorally disgusted by you. I think you have to change your society and you have to take responsibility. I can’t change you. You have to change you. How do we engage in some peace to somebody who we basically say, we don’t care about you?
Yair: Yeah, this, I understand what you’re saying, and I respect, and there’s value that, it’s a value that needs to be discussed, it’s between our values. There’s also, it’s not me, John Stuart Mill said it, you care more about the people who are closer to you, and if somebody is happy when the people who are closer to you are dying, you tend not to be too sympathetic. I agree. I’ve lost two seats in the poll just by saying, you know what? I am sorry when children in Gaza are being killed.
Donniel: Two seats. Just that statement. I got death threats. I got death threats.
Yair: Yeah, okay. Here’s a competition you’re going to lose to me.
Donniel: That’s true. Come on. The only difference is, you have security, I don’t have security. I know, but go on.
Yair: Lihi, he went once out of the house and there was a coffin. Somebody left a coffin with my name. She came back and she said, a little too early. She’s a strong woman. Her best friend is sitting here. So we need to be able to acknowledge the pain, the sorrow, the misery on the other side, even if it is self-inflicted, I agree to that.
Now let’s try and do the mechanics action. Israel has now, and I’m provoking the concentration of the room, seven fundamental problems. No less. Okay. You’re going to do the fingers. Okay. Gaza, hostage, Lebanon, Hague, ICC, Iran, of course, nuclear and everything else, international statue of the country, especially in the United States, and the economy.
Unbelievably enough, there is an organizing principle, organizing concept that will address all seven. And this is the normalization with the Saudis. And it’s not only with the Saudis, of course, it’s a triple thing with the Americans, and then with the whole Sunni world. A, this is the kind of alliance we need to take care of Gaza in the day after. And this is the kind of alliance, and I am addressing what you’ve asked to begin with, that will have to be, it will have to include at least a branch of the Palestinian Authority, and therefore it becomes the first step of this 1,000-mile journey towards peace.
This hopefully helps with the hostage situation, this stops Lebanon, this is the alliance we need opposite Iran, the one that worked, for example, on April 14, when we were attacked by Iran. This is unbelievably helpful in the modern world, in our international statute. This is, will stop the warrants in Hague, I’ve learned, because nobody’s in his right mind will prosecute an Israeli prime minister who is in the midst of a, you know, historical peace process. And this will be huge for the Israeli economy, who’s now suffering because we are still a very interesting technological player for those countries.
So you have an organizing principle of how to address the major issues this country has. And the only reason we’re not doing it is because Netanyahu is not capable of saying the words Palestinian Authority because Ben Gvir and Smotrich will not let him. And it is as ridiculous and dangerous and irresponsible as it sounds. So I’m willing to say the words Palestinian Authority and I’m talking to them, not about them, but to them and telling them, listen, it will take longer than we think because there’s one thing we cannot afford is having another terror state on our border. We have already a few. We don’t like the idea. We like it even less after October 7th. And therefore the burden of proof right now is on you.
I am for the two-state solution. I’ve said it on bigger stage, I apologize, when the General Assembly of the United Nations, as prime minister, I said I’m all for the two-state solution, and I still am. But this is this was pushed back because now they have to prove to us that they have erased the incitement that is anti-Semite and toxic from the textbooks that they have, have an ability to fight terrorism that Hamas can never, Islamic Jihad can never be part of this government because we understand what it means. They have a lot to prove to us, but there is a new leadership there that we can talk to. And it needs to be at least a trajectory.
We need to say, yeah, we understand so it’s not going to happen now, but if they’ll do this, if they will change the tects, the books, if they will fight terrorism, if they will cooperate with us five years, six years, seven years, 10 years, at least we, we have some sort of trajectory is not the word, a goal. It’s a goal. It’s an Israeli goal.
Donniel: Let me ask you an easier question.
Yair: Great.
Donniel: How does the war in Gaza end?
Yair: What we need is an alliance of Arab states. More of them than people think, vocally express the willingness to be part of this. So it will be the Saudis, the Emirates, the Moroccans, of course, the Egyptians who are crucial players in this. It cannot be directly the Palestinian Authority. What happened was people have kind of messed it with the storm of pain and anger we were all tangled up in.
The Palestinian Authority, I mean, Abu Mazen and President Abbas have created a new government of, they called it the technocratic government. This is actually, they have managed to do the impossible. It is even more corrupt than the one before. They have nine of the ministers are business partners with his son. Yeah, yeah, he’s a billionaire. He’s a billionaire. And yeah, he doesn’t donate to the Hartman Institution. I’m doing my homework.
Donniel: We’ll talk later.
Yair: Anyways, it needs to be a branch with some sort of a Chinese wall between this branch of the Palestinian Authority and the corruption and total mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority. But it needs to be part of the Palestinian Authority, for example, on the Rafah passage. There is right now, as we speak, still, officially at least, about 26,000 People in Gaza who are workers of the Palestinian Authority, they know how to sweep floors or do some banking, and this is an infrastructure. And it’s idiotic not to use this infrastructure just because Smotrich is upset. They have to be part of this, but basically this alliance, needs to be the reconstructing body of Gaza, and in Israel, we have to make sure that the people are the lunatics who are talking about going back to Gaza and building settlements out of the government.
Donniel: And could we, could we, could we accept now, I know everybody, we’re so busy with ourselves and we’re forgetting that Hamas actually has something to do with this too. Could we accept a ceasefire now in order to get the hostages back, declare victory, and start this process?
Yair: Yeah, it is a painful decision, and we know it’s not an assumption. We know Hamas, sooner or later, whatever deal you’re gonna make with them, they’re gonna give us enough excuses to tell the world we wanted to keep our word, but there’s no way we can do it. They are what they are. Right now. If the question, I mean, this whole idea of total victory, there’s no total victory in fighting guerrilla, but we need to make sure that we are transferring them completely from a semi-military organization into a guerrilla organization. And then it’s going to take 10 years until we find them all and kill them all. And this is what we need to do, find them all and kill them. But it is going to take time.
The hostage doesn’t have this time. They are dying. And the government is doing its best to make us talk about other issues. It’s to take it off the emotional agenda of this country. And it’s our duty to discuss this on daily basis and to say something about it whenever we give a speech or wherever you give a class or whatever, people need to be able to say, I made sure they didn’t make me forget all those people.
Donniel: We’re speaking about Palestinians in Gaza, speaking about Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. There are 2.2 million Palestinians, citizens of Israel. You were the first co-prime minister in a government that welcomed an Arab party, Mansour Abbas, as part of the coalition. Not supporting you from the outside, but as part of the coalition. I come from a school which believes that if Zionism does not do right by our minorities here, the ones who we don’t have a security conflict with, that Zionism will fail, that we did not come home to discriminate against minorities the way we were discriminated when we were not home and that the test of Zionism is going to be there.
You took that step. How do you conceptually describe and talk about this 20 percent of Israeli society? Lieberman just recently said, by the way, he also now says, I’m right-wing liberal. He’s also liberal. Everybody’s like, it’s part of koshering the term. But he said, we need a Zionist coalition. Like I hear that after October 7th, let’s have a Zionist coalition again. And you were willing to form a coalition of Israeli citizens. And how do we move and strengthen that? What are the things that Israeli society has to do? As our audience sees, you actually have thought about every one of these issues you’ve actually thought about. We have to change here cause it’s, we’re still living in May 21 and there’s still the fear and you know what happened to Palestinians during this war, Israeli citizens, the fear, the flattering, the silencing as an Israeli leader, how do we address this issue and how do we move forward?
Yair: I know it’s written on the paper they’re going to give you now. It’s a Knesset thing.
Donniel: I’m aware. Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m going to ask you after this just one last question and then you’ll run.
Yair: First, I know this slogan, we need a Zionist government. And everybody who comes to me says, we need now a government only of Zionist policies. So without the Haredim? They declared them, I didn’t declare them as non-Zionist, they declared themselves non-Zionist. So I agree. Well, I don’t agree. You’re right. I was the one who to invite Mansour Abbas and his party into government. And the idea was, and in ways this is even more important now than it was then, that nothing serves Hamas more than us saying every Arab is Hamas. If they are all the same, we really don’t have no one to talk to. And this is why Smotrich and Ben Gvir were pushing this, to make sure we think of all those billions of people as one thing.
There’s something in the human psychic that allows this because we always see all the complexities of our side. And we see the other side as this homogenic else, but it is not. Mansour to me is the most interesting political figure in the country by far. He’s a dentist. He told me once that dentists are number one in the world in suicide in every country. So I said, so you say,
Donniel: So he went into politics.
YairL So he went into politics.
And I was asked about this before. And I said, in an interview recently, I said, I think he should be in the next government, but he cannot be the 61st seat and all the left-wing media came to be angry and said, how, why did you say it? And I said, because he said it before, he said it a week before in an interview, you said, I realized the burden of this is too much for us at that stage. I want to be part of the government. I don’t want to be the 61st. There’s sense into it. It’s putting too much pressure on them, both in the Arab society and the Jewish society.
But, you are right. Ignoring things or pretending we don’t have 2.2 million Arabs living amongst us is a version of what we are doing with the entire Palestinian issue, which is what are we doing now? What are we doing now is we’re saying this is the bloodiest, scariest, most problematic, most complex issue of our life. And we haven’t a great idea what to do. We’re going to push it to our children. It’s going to be worse for them, but that’s our solution. And everybody says, yeah, right. Sounds great. This is not even bad politics. This is bad parenthood. So we need to do something about it. And this reach was a first step to me and to others.
Donniel: May you continue those steps. But now, before you run to the Knesset, here’s a group of 250 leaders, involved Jews, committed Jews who spent not only their time and thousands of dollars to come here to be at Israel now, who are with Israel and love Israel and who are going through complex times and ambivalent times, both in their own lives, but also vis a vis the state of Israel. As the head of the opposition of the state of Israel, what’s your last word that you would like to say to this group of North American, English, Australian, South American, and other Jews?
Yair: I know this is a bad time to say it, but we’re doing better. If somebody asked me, what’s the most amazing moment you had when you were in government, last time you were in government. So it’s not in the UN. It’s not with President Biden. It’s not signing the Jerusalem Declaration. I was at the Mauthausen concentration camp with the Austrian chancellor and the foreign minister. And the three of us are standing, the Chancellor is on the podium. There are 200 cameras opposite us from all over the world. And the Chancellor said, We came here because we want to apologize to Mr. Lapid for killing his grandfather.
Wow. Yeah. My grandpa, my grandfather was not an important man. He was a small lawyer in a small town. And they killed him in Mauthausen. He was in Auschwitz, and then he was sent to Mauthausen, and they killed him there a month before the camp was liberated. And so this is the way his life ended. And then my father, who was a kid in the ghetto, came over here to a very small, struggling country. He did well, but he was still holding, in ways, the fragility of where he came from, and the country he created with others, and he still got a phone call before the Six Day War from my grandparents who were in, I think Romania at the time said, send over the kids because you’re all going to be killed.
And I grew up in the post-’67, I was born before, but I grew up in the post-’67 War. Israel is already a dominant power in the Middle East. And my children are part of the Israeli start-up nation. My other son was, I just had the granddaughter, my first granddaughter, three months ago, I don’t like the children no more, I only love her. Anyway, he is already, he’s making more money than his dad. He’s living the dream of the Israelis, the start-up nation, he’s in high tech, which means when we are looking at this year by year, month by month, we are entitled to be as depressed as possible.
But we are doing better as people, as an idea, as Jews. We are free. We can decide on our destiny. And if we don’t like what is happening, we don’t have to answer to the guard of the ghetto. We can go out and take to the streets and demonstrate and make sure that this government falls. We are doing better and it’s up to us. And when it’s up to us, we will do good. So this is the message.
You know, I will say one little thing about centrism and this, I will end with this. The left is about the individual, the person. It’s a movement of singular. The right is about the country, this huge group. The center is about the community, and you are my community.
Donniel: Thank you.
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