A personal incident with Yair Lapid showcases his political ideology

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Let’s take this slowly dear readers, because the context is paramount. What happened to us, the Palestinian people, in terms of forced displacement and dissociation [from our homeland and people] has had powerful political, social, and geographic repercussions dating back to the Nakba. This is a personal incident that took place over three decades ago when I was living in my hometown of Yafa, a young journalist in my early twenties.

We had known each other from afar before, as we were both rising stars in Hebrew-language media in the mid-80s, specifically in Tel Aviv. He was from a European Jewish family that survived the holocaust and settled in my country, Palestine, and became a right-wing Israeli writer in the right-wing Maariv daily. And I am a leftist Palestinian Arab from Yafa, from the minority that became survivors of the Nakba in West Palestine, particularly in Yafa whose 150,000-strong population was reduced to 3,500 after they were forcefully ejected.

I didn’t realize that he (Yair Lapid) was going to attend the conference. It didn’t even occur to me, because I was not a party correspondent, and I used to cover everything related to political life. I didn’t realize who had been sitting in the front row, opposite (much to my surprise) the murderer Ariel Sharon and his Likud friends who were in power. However, in this packed hall in north "Tel Aviv" (built over the remains of the Palestinian village of Jamasin whose inhabitants were all displaced), wherein the leader of the Likud-led Israeli government, and many local and international reporters were present, there was only one empty seat in the front row, next to one person with a “large head”, then I thought, so be it (I had only gotten the chance to get into the conference, which was unusual for an Arab journalist, thanks to my tenacity).

Between my “urge” to stare at Sharon and look at him closely from two meters away, the man who represents [the antithesis] of what I am, as a Palestinian, particularly following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and my desire to challenge all those like him, (it seems) that I experienced an adrenaline rush that pushed me to make an effort toward taking that empty seat. All the attendees were focused on the podium, and none of them paid any attention to what I had done (everyone had gone through a thorough security check), except for the "big-head" who took the seat to the right of the empty one.

Quickly, he turned towards me and saw who I was. He got angry, and you could see the blood rushing to his face with anger; he could not help but show his hate toward me. His body language toward me was one of disgust and animosity. This person was none other than Yair Lapid, who was then a reporter in the Israeli right-wing Maariv.

This was in 1989, after I graduated from "Tel Aviv" University and began to make a name for myself in the Hebrew-language press. However, I had committed the “sin” of exposing the Israeli army and reporting on the first Palestinian Intifada to the world when I used to write in Haaretz. Lapid and I were from the same generation, but his paper was one of those media outlets that ran a campaign against me after I exposed the Israeli occupation’s crimes in the Gaza Strip at the time.

That story was the one that came to mind when I saw, on live broadcast, how Lapid became Prime Minister of the Israeli occupation government instead of Bennett.

Ever since Lapid established the “Yesh Atid” party, and the still-nascent party grew to hold the second-largest block in a decade (there is a difference between the party and the bloc representing it in Knesset, according to the electoral law), journalists have been repeating one phrase more than any other: “The world is now studying who Yair Lapid is.”

Today, after Lapid has now become Prime Minister, the media is asking the same question again, as if it learned nothing about him. Still, such things must always be pursued over the year in case any “transformations” take place in the Zionist political establishment. 

I thought about this phrase: “The world is now studying who Yair Lapid is” and asked myself what all these Israeli affairs pundits of different nationalities have been doing over the last four decades if they haven’t heard of Lapid and the organizations that shaped his life since his youth.

I said to myself: “Lapid is the son of Lapid folks!” Though it’s true that not people take after their biological parents in their political path in life, and examples of this are many. But it is necessary for one to learn more about the political background of a family (which acts as a model for social upbringing) in case any of the were to delve into politics, for the sake of study and comparison.

Yair Lapid is the spoiled child of two European Jewish right-wing Zionist secular parents, both of whom, Serbian-born Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, and Shulamit Lapid, worked on cementing the Zionist myth and polishing Israeli public opinion through a near-fascist manner by way of cultural engineering over dozens of years.

Whereas the mother worked in literature, as a novelist that pushed forward the Jewish-Zionist settlement to occupied Palestine, the father worked in Radio and TV in a number of positions wherein he was responsible for laying the cultural-media policies of Jewish youth. He later moved to politics, working with right-wing secular parties like Shinui, and finally became a minister in the government of the criminal Sharon.

I followed up on Yair Lapid’s writing ever since we worked in the field together in the mid-8s (as colleagues in the profession, not as friends), including after my leaving Palestine in the 1990s. I can only say (and this can be only substantiated by studies, later on, given time) that this Yair Lapid is Lapid junior. Particularly, [one can see this] when he announced a decade ago, that he sat down to look at election polls at home with his mother Shulamit (to write his victory speech). His speech came to include stories of his father, who died in 2008.

This political upbringing, which can be called pseudo-ethnic and racist, is the same that led to leaks that he supports designating occupied Al-Quds as the eternal capital of “Israel”, and for him to sit down at the same time with serial colonizer Bennett.

It is this same political upbringing that had him in 1989 forego the political aspect of the Likud conference and discuss his anger at how he was shocked to find out that the Palestinian Makram Khoury-Machool, who “dared to play the role of a military correspondent”, entered the hall and sat down next to him, expressing his refusal of the “other”, in a rather rude and crude manner, because he wanted only one Al-Quds to be his, alone.

Truly, the personal is the political. Some may say “no you should wait and you’ll see that he’s different.”

I say: “When Lapid changes, accepts the Palestinian and the Palestinian right, and not trickery and cooperation with Palestinian sellouts, I will be prepared to recant my words.”