The interim PM, in his first address, decries the scourge of extremism that ‘flows like lava’ from Israel’s politics into the streets
By David Horovitz 2 July 2022, 11:32 pm
Yair Lapid is no longer bound by the ideological constraints of an eight-party, radically diverse coalition. That partnership has collapsed, the Knesset dispersed on Thursday, and elections were set for November 1.
Yet in his first address to the nation as interim prime minister on Saturday night, Lapid gave a speech that few in that extraordinary right-left-center-Arab coalition would find problematic. And that was precisely his point.
In what marked the first salvo of his four-month campaign to persuade Israelis to elect him to the post he has inherited from Naftali Bennett, Lapid presented himself as the prime minister of an Israel with shared goals and values, an Israel stronger, safer and happier when it can healthily manage its inevitable internal disagreements, an Israel whose public is far more unified than its politicians have been.
He used the speech to set out some core personal credentials to an electorate of which some parts, he acknowledged, “don’t and won’t” support his caretaker government.
He reminded the watching public that he is the son of a Holocaust survivor, and thus profoundly aware — given the horrors and betrayals of World War II — of the imperative that the revived Jewish nation always be capable of defending itself, by itself.
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