The Zionist Opposition - with Yair Lapid
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, many Israelis expected a political reckoning. Yet, no clear alternative to Netanyahu has emerged. While there is no shortage of politicians who oppose him, the power of those on the center and the left seems stymied at best. We invited the leader of the official opposition in Israel’s Knesset to the podcast to discuss what he and his party stand for, whether the center of gravity of Israel’s politics has shifted, and why Israel’s political opposition does not appear to be a major force today.
Yair Lapid is a former journalist and the founder and leader of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party. Since entering politics in 2013, Lapid has served as Israel’s Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, and for a brief time, Prime Minister. He is now Leader of the Opposition.
Full Transcript
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YL: My father was a child in the Budapest Ghetto in the basement, and you know, my father had his bar mitzvah in the ghetto. His mother called him and she said, you don't remember this, but today's your bar mitzvah. Dad is not gonna come because my grandfather was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and she said, I cannot bake a cake. They lived out of the, mostly the meat of dead horses they found on the street. And she said, there's only one thing I can do, and she, she pulls out a very small bottle of Chanel five, which is the perfume elegant ladies used to use, and she broke it on the floor and for a second there, there was in the basement the smell of flowers in spring and she said, at least it's not gonna stink in my son's bar mitzvah. So I'm looking at my daughter and, and I'm telling myself now what my life is, is just this road between those two basements. And ever since this morning, my only goal is to get out of the basement. Emotionally, spiritually. This is the society we wanted to build in this country. It's the society that says no to living in basements.
DS: It's 12:30 PM on Sunday, March 9th, here in New York City. It is 6:30 PM on Sunday, March 9th in Israel. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, 2023, many Israelis expected a political reckoning for the failures of its government going back a number of years, but especially on October 7th, the greatest catastrophe in Israeli history. For the past 17 months, political polls in Israel have consistently shown that a majority of Israelis believe that the Netanyahu led government should take responsibility for those failures, and yet, despite all of that, no strong alternative to Netanyahu or the political right for that matter has emerged from that opposition. While there is no shortage of politicians and people who oppose Netanyahu, the ability of those on the center and the left seemed to be stymied at best. In the brief time that Netanyahu was the leader of Israel's opposition under the government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lipid, he did all he could to ensure that the government was short-lived. Today, a number of Israelis that I speak to wonder where the opposition has gone. And so we wanted to ask the leader of that opposition Yair Lapid, what does the Zionist opposition stand for, and why has it been slow to be able to create an event that could replace this government? Yair Lapid joins us today from Tel Aviv. Yair, good to be with you.
YL: Hi Dan. Is it okay if we start by me disagreeing completely with everything you've just said?
DS: Of course. Go ahead.
YL: Okay. So what is really happening is that the government is glued to its seats by desperation. In every poll in the last 17 months, if there is an election in Israel, they will lose in an avalanche way. So this is why they're saying we'll do everything in our power, and they have the power, they have the votes in Knesset to make sure there will be no election. Now, the fact of the matter is if there'll be an election, the majority of those people will be out of politics, and you are right, this is because the people of Israel are blaming them for what happened on October 7th and since. Now, on the other hand, if there is no opposition, how come they're losing in every pole? There's always a gap between the political arena and the way real people in real life feel. There are two things I will have to disagree with. You said when Netanya was the leader of the opposition and I was prime Minister, that he did everything in his power. Yes. Including things that we are looking back at and we are doubtful if they are legal, for example, the two Knesset members that have been part of our coalition and decided all of a sudden to vote against the coalition are now ministers in Netanyahu's government, which is illegal. Now, a lot of people want me to do the same. To go to a back alley to make dark offers in dark rooms and you know, to be their Netanyahu. I refuse. I don't think that the two alternatives that the Israeli people need to have is one government that is corrupt to the bone. And then that the one who wants to be corrupt to the bone but doesn't succeed. A real alternative means yes, we are not like them. We don't want to be like them. We saw where does it lead us as people, as a society, I want to create a healthy community in Israel. Being an alternative means you're not gonna do some of the things they have done. And on top of this, there's another thing, there was in the last year and a half a war. And you are not doing the same things you're doing in wartime that you do in peace time. Meaning our soldiers, those young lions are in Gaza, in Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Syria, fighting for our lives. So you have to limit yourselves in terms of the political vocabulary you're going to use, even though people would blame you for not being ruthless enough for politics. In those real groups in Gaza are fighting as we speak, there is somebody from the right and somebody from the left, and there are Lapid supporter and a Bennett supporter and a Netanyahu supporter, but they're fighting together as units as one, and we don't want to tell them that the Israeli political arena is trying to separate them. Uh, we are separated enough as it is.
DS: Okay. But I do think there's something else going on here, I think, which is the entire Israeli political spectrum has moved to the right. So if you were right before October 7th, you are very right now. If you were center before October 7th, you've probably moved center right. If you were left before October 7th, you've also moved probably more to the center or perhaps the center right. And therefore, I do wonder whether or not anyone in the opposition may be with an exception of Yair Golan, who we just had on the podcast. I do wonder whether anyone outside of government is articulating a vision for where Israel goes with this war, not just this war with Hamas, but the seven front war that is really concretely different from where the Netanyahu government is going. I'm not talking about the details and I'm not talking about the tactics, but from a big picture perspective, does the Netanyahu led government see the threats arrayed against Israel in a way that is much different than you do?
YL: I don't know about moving to the right or to the left. I think all the definitions of right and left are gone since October 7th. We are more motivated by fear and pain. I do not think that fear and pain are good political leaders. There will always be politicians who will try to exploit on fear and pain, and part of our job is to say we understand, but we think there must be a smarter way of handling things. And this goes to your question right now, we've been fighting for a year and 4, 5, 6 months without an end game, without a goal. Now, war is not a goal. War is a tool, war is a means. And the Netanyahu government didn't articulate not to itself and not to anyone else, what is the better future they're trying to create because they have no clue. And this is probably why they're now saying, we will vote for the opposition when the election will take place. We think, for example, that Egypt should run Gaza for the next 15 years. And of course we are saying we want to do everything in power to push forward what is known as the normalization with the Saudis, which is even a bigger thing, which is creating a regional coalition. And we understand that part of this is going to have a Palestinian component. We want to be able to influence this. We want to, we, we are not gonna just give in on, on our security. We do remember that they were serving candies in Ramallah on October 7th. And therefore we have a lot to be worried about. And the incitement in, in the textbooks of the Palestinian author is still unbearable. Still, I think. We at least have a vision that of separation from the Palestinians within, I don't know, the next decade. It's not gonna happen tomorrow, five years from now, six years, but we need to make sure we are not taking steps that will prevent this from happening forever, because I think even if we believe that there is no such thing as the end of conflict, even running this conflict or handling this conflict will be better off doing this through the reality of separation from the Palestinians, not trying to live with them forever, not let alone annexing them and being in charge of 5 million Palestinians who hates us. So there is a vision. There's another flaw to this, which is domestic issues. What kind of country we want to be, what kind of a democracy we want to be. How are we going to balance between those very contradicting terms, Judaism and, and democracy? I mean, we've been saying we wanna be a Jewish democratic state, but there is an inherent contradiction within those two terms. That needs to be handled in what I've mentioned before as a healthy community. We need to rebuild as a healthy community. Bringing back the hostages is stage one for any rebuilding of the Israeli society, but there's so much more to be done. And right now, the Netanyahu government doesn't have a, a vision. You don't have new visions after 20 years in power, you are just trying to maintain. Everybody talks about Machiavelli's Prince and nobody actually read it, or they read it 35 years ago and they don't remember. Basically what Machiavelli is saying is the purpose of the government is to stay in power, and apparently Netanyahu was a devoted reader.
DS: I want to come back specifically to the Palestinian issue and also your plan, your proposed plan for Egypt running Gaza. So those are contemporary issues I want to get to, but before I do, I ask all of our first time guests this question, which is, can you take us back to October 7th for you, where you were, when you were learning about these developments, these catastrophic developments, and what were you thinking? Like, what was going through your head?
YL: I will start two weeks beforehand. On September 20, I just came out from a security briefing with Netanyahu. We do this monthly. It's, it's the law here.
DS: You mean it's law that the leader, the formal head of the opposition, must be briefed monthly by the Prime Minister on the security situation? Just generally?
YL: Yes. It's a monthly briefing, so I went to the briefing and I was horrified by what I heard. So I spent three days reading in the Foreign Security Committee, all the intelligence materials, and then I told them, I'm gonna have a press conference. I will not forgive myself unless I will warnt he people of Israel that something terrible is gonna happen. So we did the press conference and I said to the limit of, uh, you know, scratching the surface of telling people things they should not know. But basically I said, listen, something horrible is gonna happen to us. The government has neglected its first duty, which is making sure we are safe. Security situation is at its worst and nobody cares, so I wasn't surprised. October 7th, 6:30 in the morning, I wake up from sirens in my home in Tel Aviv and my first thought is Yael. Yael is my daughter, she's a young woman with special needs. She's autistic, she doesn't speak, and therefore when something radical is happening, it is very hard to explain to her what is happening. So I'm going to her room and I wake her up. She's upset and I'm taking her down to the basement, which is both my study and the shelter.
DS: The Mamad, like your shelter to protect or where you are supposed to go when there's sirens, potential missile attacks.
YL: Yeah. And of course my wife comes with us and I have security outside my house. So they come in, uh, and they're with us in the shelter, there were three of them. And then there's sirens and explosions, and you can hear the whistling of rockets and then the crash. I don't remember being scared, but I was alert I, I assume is the word. And phone calls come in all the time. So it's the military Secretary of the Prime Minister's calling me and said, uh, well, well, we have to meet later on today. I said, yes, tell the Prime Minister I will meet him. Uh, let's, and we schedule it for 4:30. And I got quite a few phone calls from parents who called me out of desperation, didn't know how to call. They said we lost connection with our children, some of them never got the connection back. These are kids who went to the Nova Party and other places. I have another phone call, I have a Knesset member who lives in Sderot behind the police station that was occupied by Hamas. So she's calling me and she's whispering. She says, Yair, Yair, Yair we have terrorists outside our house. They're shooting. They're shooting. And she has a daughter in Kfar Azza, in the one of the kibbutz that was invaded. And I'm telling you, stay with me on the phone, let's talk about. And at one point or another, I'm looking around, me and my daughter is gone. So I'm going up to the kitchen. The security says you cannot leave the shelter, I said I don't care, I'm going up to the kitchen. And finally, she, she had her headphones on like we are now, right now. And I, even though they were on, I could hear because she was playing in maximum volume, the same song over and over again. Funnily enough, it was, it's a small world after all, you know, that do in, in Disney parks. So she's disconnecting. So all I want is to hug her, but autistic people do not like hugs. So I'm just holding her hands because I don't want her to bang her own head. And I'm saying, I say Yaelli we have to go down, we have to go down, we have to go down. And by then the security came up with me. So now I feel like I'm risking their life. And it, it takes time and we, we are going down. Lihi helped Lihi, my wife helps me, of course. So in a way, my focus was on this. So I was there for a while. Television was on, and Lihi is looking at television. She, she, she looks at me, she looks horrified, and she says 40 people were killed. And I said, Lihi, it's way more than 40 people. Images are coming through television. Stories are coming through the phone. One of the reporters called me, I don't remember whom exactly, and I said to him, maybe because of my own background, being the son of a Holocaust survivor, I said, you know, this is the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
DS: Which it was.
YL: Which it was. He answered like, I have a flair for the dramatics, but listen, I'm just looking at this basement. My father was a child in the Budapest Ghetto in the basement. And the fact that nobody came for years, they're in the basement waiting for the Russians to rescue them or or to free Budapest.
DS: And then you're back at it.
YL: And then I'm back at it.
DS: Right.
YL: And you know, my father had this bar mitzvah in, in the ghetto. His mother called him and she said he didn't remember he has a bar mitzvah. And she said to him, she said, you don't remember this, but today's your bar mitzvah. Dad is not gonna come because my grandfather was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and she said, I cannot bake a cake. They lived out of mostly the meat of dead horses they found on the street. And she said, there's only one thing I can do. And she pulls out a very small bottle of Chanel five, which is the perfume elegant ladies pre-war world used to use. And she broke it on the floor. And for a second there, there was in the basement the smell of flowers in spring and she said, at least it's not gonna stink in my son's bar mitzvah. So I'm looking at my daughter and, and I'm telling myself now what my life is, is just this road between those two basements. And ever since this morning, my only goal is to get out of the basement emotionally, spiritually. This is again, a healthy society, the society we wanted to build in this country is the society that says no to living in basements. So this is the way the day-
DS: This is the way you were processing the day, and then later in the day, you met with the Prime minister.
YL: Yeah. I met at 4:30 with the Prime Minister. I said, listen, we have to have an emergency government. Get rid of Ben Gvir and Smotrich and all those people who are, who just want us to kill and be killed forever. And we will create the two big parties of Israel and an emergency party, I'll bring the rest of the centrist center-right and the left opposition parties, because we have to deal with it together. And he said no. He said, I'm not getting rid of, uh, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, if you want to join them, join us. I said, listen, I'm not gonna argue with you. I'm gonna have a press conference and I'm going to offer this, and it's up to you for now on, and I had at, I think at 6:30, I had a press conference and I said, I think we have to have an emergency government, the people of Israel must unite now. All differences should be put aside, and I'm calling upon the Prime Minister to do this. And he never returned to me. And four or five days later, Gantz decided, Benny Gantz decided to join the government with Ben Gvir and Smotrich. And I think seven or eight months later, they left the government saying, well, maybe Lapid was right. This couldn't have been the real answer to what the country needed.
DS: Why couldn't you have joined with Ben Gvir and Smotrich in the government? I mean, I know you think it was suboptimal for other reasons you lay out, but you probably still could have contributed in a meaningful way. When Menachem Begin joined Levi Eshkol’s government when the Six Day War began, my understanding is it wasn't conditional. I'll join the government if. It was, we're at war, this is an existential threat to our country, I'm gonna stand shoulder to shoulder with you and we are gonna get to work.
YL: A part of what is fundamentally wrong with the current government is the fact that it is legitimizing Jewish fascism. Jewish fascism shouldn't be legitimized. And besides at the time, bangy, for example, is in charge, not only of the entire police, but also of the army units of the police working with the army. So he's gonna run this entire force, military force and Smotrich is gonna run the Israeli economy during wartime, and we will not have a say on this. I've been in and out of governments since 2013. There is a way of handling things, especially during crisis. These people are not the right people to lead the people of Israel in time of war, in time of soar, look at the way they're preventing now the return of the hostages, the hostage deal, saying out loud, well, this is not the most important thing. The most important thing is the continuation of the war, and the purpose of the war is the war. So I didn't want to be, and I don't want to be just the camouflage for the global community, that this is a functional saying government when it's not.
DS: Immediately after October 7th, the government outlined its objectives in the war to destroy Hamas and to get the hostages back. And that means destroy Hamas militarily, and it means destroy, destroy Hamas' governing capabilities. Prevent it ever from being able to reassert any kind of control over Gaza again. Destroy Hamas, hostages back. Do you think both of those goals are achievable?
YL: Destroying Hamas is gonna take a lot of time. They have moved quite rapidly from a semi military organization to a guerilla army and fighting guerillas is always long. So I completely agree to the fact that this is a goal for Israel to eliminate Hamas to destroy its military capabilities and to find an alternative governing body to Gaza because you know, annexing Gaza is no option. But the return of the hostages, it's just way more, more urgent because they're dying there because we have a duty to them. Because there's no way for the Israel society to heal unless there will be a proof that Israel has done everything in its power, including concessions we don't like and we do not in order to bring them back home.
DS: Do you think there's any lesson from the 2011 hostage deal in which Israel released 1027 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons for one hostage. Some of those prisoners included Yahya Sinwar and his lieutenants who were serving multiple life sentences who returned to Gaza rose within the ranks of Hamas and lived to plot and orchestrate October 7th. There is this sense that when you do these kinds of lopsided deals, A, you guarantee there will be more violence against Jews because violent people, which we now know with genocidal ambitions and who are quite capable in terms of executing those genocidal ambitions, get released from Israeli prisons and they get to work in Gaza or the West Bank, wherever they go, and B, you just create that incentive system because the message you send to Hamas and other enemies of Israel is stealing Israeli's works and it's, it shouldn't be lost in anyone that there was one Gilad Shalit that was returned in 2011, only for on October 7th, 250 plus Israeli hostages taken. The message is do more of this because it works.
YL: I was against the Shalit deal.
DS: You were?
YL: Yeah I was. One of the very few voices within the Israeli public arena, and I was at the time.
DS: Yeah, you weren't in government.
YL: I wasn't in government. Right.
DS: Did you come out publicly?
YL: Yes.
DS: Well, let's stay on that for a second, because how did you, I mean, I, I wanna use your own language that you just articulated quite movingly, that Israel can't leave anyone behind. So there was an opportunity to get Gilad Shalit back.
YL: Yeah, but this is apples and oranges. He's a soldier. Or he was a soldier. He's alive, of course. He was one man. He wasn't neglected. There wasn't a disappearance of the government and the army at the same time when he was taken hostage and the price was too high. But going back to what you have asked, there's no shortage of people who want to kill Jews because they're Jews. There's no shortage of homicidal maniacs on the other side of the border. It is up to us to prevent the murder of Jews. And this is why the Israel, the state of Israel was established because nobody came for the rescue to my dad on, on the Budapest Ghetto. So now we have an Israeli army and an Israeli free state. And I keep telling people, listen, if you think about the fight against terror, against Hamas, against Hezbollah, so there's always three things. There's motive, there is capabilities, and there's chance. The motive is always the same and has been here in Israel in the last 140 years in the history of Judaism for the last 3000 years, they want to kill Jews because the hatred that is ancient and diabolic. The capabilities, you know what the capabilities that we saw on October 7th when it's not like they were using, I don't know, ballistic missiles. These was guys with, with trucks and Toyota trucks and Kalashnikovs, AK-47s. So the one thing that was left was chance. They looked at the Israeli society, they looked at the Israeli government, they looked at the Israeli army and they said, this is our chance. So the government's duty is to make sure there will be no chance ever again. But this doesn't contradict the fact that the motive and the capabilities are gonna be there whether you released a lot of prisoners or not. Yes, we will have to release a lot of prisoners. Yes, those prisoners wants to kill more Jews and we, it's our duty to prevent this from happening by killing them. But we have a greater duty and the state of Israel will not heal unless the hostages are back home.
DS: I want to ask you about how you balance your role as leader of the opposition inside Israel, which among other things, your job is to hold the government accountable, which means obviously being very critical of the government and your role as a voice for Israel on the international scene. And as a strong supporter of Israel, as an American, when I have been on television defending Israel on American television during various flashpoints since October 7th, and I defend decisions Israel is making, I deal with the situation where the anchors of these shows that are interviewing me will say, well, do you see what other Israeli politicians are saying about Israel's decision making? Do you see, what, do you see these protests in the streets? Do you see like they agree with us, not with you, is what these television anchors who are interrogating me say, I just think for a lot of Jews like me in the diaspora, in, in the United States, it's in the uk, it's Canada, it's Australia, it's all over the place, feel that striking this balance for Israeli politicians that may not be supportive of this government for the long run is understandable, but also their, their role in making the case for Israel at war and Israel under siege is equally, if not more important.
YL: Yeah. Well, listen, there's no textbook. What do you do as an opposition leader, it, it's when I came into politics creating a party of, of the Israeli Center, of the Israeli middle class of people who are saying, we are, we are not happy with the way this country is spreading its resources or, or we wanna support liberal values. Nobody has prepared me or anyone else to the moment in which we are gonna have the worst day of the for the Jews since the Holocaust on one hand. But we will have to present at least some aspiration to unity to the world. So there's no way for me to, I mean, nobody has ever given me the textbook for this. So what we are trying to do is to make sure people understand you can't be critical of the government while being fully supportive of the people of Israel and the state of Israel. Three and a half weeks ago I was in AIPAC, so I was the keynote speaker.
DS: This is at the AIPAC conference in DC. That's what you're referring to where you and I got together.
YL: Yeah. There was one thing I said that I had no clue that people are gonna be responsive of or, or react to this. I said, listen. I know you have some problems with elements, extreme elements within the Israeli government, but I wanna remind you, you can love the state of Israel even if you don't like the government of Israel. You can love the people of Israel, even if you don't like the government. And it was amazing. It was a stand the longest standing ovation in the speech. You could feel the relief. Listen, when Minister Amihai Eliyahu is saying we should nuke Gaza, with the 2 million people who are living there, no one is in his right mind is supposed to support this. And when somebody is asking you about this in international media, I don't want to blubber and I don't, I don't wanna say something that will be elusive enough for people to understand. I'm against it while not being critical of the government of Israel, I'm against it. Period. And the fact, for example, that the Israel government has failed to say on every screen on the Western sphere that we are sorry for every child who died in Gaza because children are not supposed to die on grownups wars. And then again, this doesn't mean you are going to use all kind of humanitarian sayings or phrases in order to prevent us from defending ourselves, doesn't mean I, I cannot do it. So yes, Israel cannot allow itself to have a nuclear Iran. Yes, we are gonna fight Hamas till the last one of them is gone, no matter how long this will take.
DS: So on that note, how would you assess the way Israel and the IDF have conducted this war. If you're asked on an international platform, if you're subjected to criticism of how Israel has conducted this war, how do you respond?
YL: I tell them we've been fighting against a horrible terror organization that is using his own people as human shields, the elderly, the babies, the children, the women as human shields. And we are doing our best to avoid hurting the innocent, but this is war. And if you take the statistics, talking about facts, Israel is hurting less people for such a dense, populated area than any other army in the history of wars. If you make the compersion for, I dunno, Mosul, the fight against Isis in Mosul, you see the difference in numbers. We are doing our best, but are we expected not to be engaged in the war against those people and just wait, sitting on our hands waiting for them to kill us again because they have the ability to manipulate public opinion in the west against us? No. Yes, we are fighting for our lives and when you are fighting for your life, they will be Dresden In Germany, there will be Mosul and where there will be Gaza. Now I refuse to apologize for protecting ourselves. Yet again, one of the problems is the fact that the Israeli government, for populist reasons, is refusing to acknowledge the pain of innocent people are being hurt. I do not. So, and it, I think it's, it's the right answer. I think it's the Jewish answer to say every child who is killed there and, and to say it and to mean it. Every child who was killed there, I feel for. But if I have to choose between our children and their children, I will do whatever is necessary to protect our children.
DS: I've heard you say a version of this, the Palestinians have agency in all of this. Israel can't want peace, but the Palestinians more than the Palestinians want peace. I guess how has your thinking on that evolved? I'm curious what your thinking was during the second Intifada when Israel, you know, offers under Ehud Barak a more generous deal to the Palestinians than has ever been offered, basically offered them, you know, the West Bank, Gaza and most of East Jerusalem is its capital, and Arafat walks outta the deal, this is according to President Clinton at Camp David, and it's followed by some 140 terrorist attacks against Jews. To this day, I think Jews in Israel and around the world still don't understand what was happening. Like what was that about? You know, Israel made this generous offer and then it was met with this response. And so I guess when you say the Palestinians have agency here, how far back does your thinking go on that? Is that a post-October 7th revelation, or is that something you have been feeling for some time?
YL: First of all, it goes back way before October 7th. I had breakfast in 2000, I think ‘13 or the beginning of ‘14. I had breakfast in Jerusalem with, at the time, secretary of State John Kerry. I was in the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians. We came up with what was known later on as the Kerry framework that Tzipi Livni and myself had pushed Netanyahu to agree to it. And then, uh, president Abbas went to Washington set in the White House opposite President Obama and said, no way Jose. So what I was telling at the time, secretary Kerry, and this, this applies for these days as well, is that I'm still a supporter of at least maintaining the possibility of the two state solution. But we have to understand that the Palestinian state or wannabe state needs to be a peace loving one. Can the Palestinians promise us that if they will have their own state, it'll be a peaceful, peace-loving, fighting terror state, or it's just gonna become another terror base as it happened in Gaza. One of the things people tend to forget about Gaza is that we left. We left Gaza in 2005. You know what? We left them with 3000 greenhouses for them to start to build an economy for themselves, and they demolished the greenhouses and build training camps for Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. And a year later, when we left, the Palestinian Authority was there, and a year later they have elected Hamas. On the only free election in Gaza ever. By the way, if you poll the Palestinian Society today, in every poll made by the Palestinians, Hamas is still winning. So here's where the center stands. Okay? Unlike the left, we don't believe that signing a piece of paper will solve all the problems and will bring us to the end of conflict. This doesn't work this way, not everywhere, especially not in the Middle East. Unlike the Israeli, right, we do not believe that there's a possibility of maintaining the, the conflict, as they call it, forever and ever. These are 5 million people who hates us. We'll be better off separating from them, but we have to separate from them in a way that will promise us the one most important thing, which is the security of the Israeli people. But the burden of proof is on the Palestinians to be the peacekeeping, non-violent country if they want to be ever become a country.
DS: One thing I've been struck by, I've been doing conducting interviews since October 7th with a number of Israeli officials and current officials, past officials, journalists, and there's this sense that the threat from Hamas that unleashed itself on October 7th had been building for years and years and years. It didn't happen overnight. And some of the fiercest critics of the government that is in power and was in power and still is in power on October 7th, were in positions of power during those years and years. They were senior military officials. They were senior government officials. You yourself said, you know, in the 2014 Gaza, Hamas, uh, war with Israel, you were the finance minister. You've since been foreign minister and Prime Minister. Did you see this? I mean, I know you said those from those security briefings in 2023, close to October 7th, you were alarmed, which I get, but I'm, this thing was years in the making. You don't build, you know, hundreds of miles of tunnels overnight. You don't train what is the equivalent of a light infantry army of a sovereign state with 25/26 battalions overnight. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. There was something big happening over a long period of time, some of which you were serving in various governments.
YL: What you do when you run a country or when you are a government, what you do is you manage the risks. Hezbollah, even today, is a much bigger terror organization than Hamas and a much bigger threat. Iran is a much bigger threat than any country around us, including Syria, Lebanon, et cetera. So what you do is you make decisions according to a situation. The problem, as I said, there was always the same motive. There was always the capabilities and there was the chance. The one thing that we were not prepared for is a government that gets all the signals and doesn't seem to care. When I was Prime Minister, every morning starts the same way. Okay? I wake up at 6:30, I'm going to the office. They bring me my first coffee, where's the first coffee? Enters the military secretary and tells me what is going on on the borders of Israel. Which is the immediate threat because when you are the prime minister of the Jewish state, the first thing you have to make sure is that the Jewish people are protected. So he's saying, this is what happening with the border in Gaza. This is what happening, the border of Egypt, which we have a peace agreement with. This is what happening in the border of Jordan and the et cetera, et cetera. And you, you go into details with him about each and every border because this is the job. They just published some of the investigations they did within the army and they said there was a chance in September ‘22, Sinwar felt that he's ready for the same kind of invasion and gave it up. The reason he gave it up, there was a government in Israel at the time that was really alarmed and alert and ready. The one thing that happened is even though he was warned so many times, the judicial reform or revolution is weakening the Israeli society. And even though everybody was saying that this government is not preoccupied with the right things, that's dealing with tearing apart the Israeli society, instead of making sure the Israel security is as alert as it should be, is the reason they're attacked. So yes, Hamas was a threat two years before, five years before, ten years before, but they could have done it on October 7th because of negligence by the army. This was a toxic combination between the wrong government and complacent army that has neglected this duty and a tragic misunderstanding by some of the security intelligence bodies, reading the material that was mounting on the tables, so everybody's to be blamed. Everybody who was there at the moment should go home. I don't wanna say in shame, but at least take the responsibility opposite the Israeli people and the families of the people who were killed.
DS: Okay. Yair, I know you've gotta wrap. Uh, before we do, I often ask our guests to end with some glimmer of hope. What are you hopeful about? 'cause I know your job as leader of the opposition is to be critical.
YL: Yeah.
DS: Very critical. And so tell me something you're hopeful for.
YL: Okay. I'll give you the historic perspective because this is, was embodied into the conversation. My grandfather died in a concentration camp, naked in the snow, killed for being Jewish. My father was a child in the Budapest ghetto, in 1948 he made aliyah to Israel in a shaky boat, came to a very, very small country. Only 600,000 Jews, less people than what lives now in Jerusalem. Okay. My children grew up in the startup nation with the biggest, smartest, strongest military in the Middle East, with friends, with deep relations, with connection and relation, family relations with with the diaspora, we are doing better. The thing is, we don't wake up in the morning and doing historical perspectives because this is not how we work as humans. But basically, if you look at the situation of the Jewish people in the last 80 years, we have built something here in Israel. In 80 years less than a, I'm starting, my starting point is dad in the ghetto and to right now. So in 80 years, less than a lifetime of one man or a woman, my mom is 90 years old. We have built something incredible. And come rain or come shine, this thing is going to exist and it's going to exist because of what we share, not what separates us and what we share is a very weird, kind of smart and a national Jewish ability to revive and an unbelievable, incredible ability to come from whatever ashes. Viktor Frankl said, Viktor Frankl, the famous Holocaust psychiatrist and author, he says, the circumstances we cannot control, the one thing we can control is us within the circumstances. If I look at what happened in Israel the last year and a half, it is unbelievable. With the worst possible government, with vicious cruelest enemies in the world, we have revived as people holding each other, working with each other, believing in each other, in a way no other nation in history was able to pull, and these forces are there. And what we need to do now is communicate this to our brothers and sisters in the diaspora because they feel for us, but they have to feel the good stuff as well, and then make this into a change in this country that is possible, probable, and will happen.
DS: Alright, that is uh, enough with the doom and gloom. That's a good place to end. Yair Lapid, thank you for taking the time. Good to be with you as always, and uh, I look forward to being in touch soon. Talk to you soon.
YL: Thank you, Dan. It was a pleasure.
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