#958: The Words and the Passion of Yair Lapid
Among Israelis, oh-havei Yisrael (“lovers of Israel”), Jews from America to Zaire (‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo”) and diplomats the world over, the name Yair (Hebrew for either “to illuminate” or “to clarify”) Lapid (hebrew for “torch” or “flame”) is as well known as that of Bibi Netanyahu or Anthony Blinken. And in my opinion, deservedly so. For the now 59 year old (he will become 60 this coming November 5) is a true polymath, herein understood to be “a person with a wide range of interests and expertise in many various fields of science, humanities and the arts.” In his adult life, Lapid, who himself is the descendent of journalists, writers, poets and politicians (several of whom were murdered in the Holocaust), is himself a writer in various genres (novels, thrillers, plays, memoirs, biographies, daily columns and politics), an actor, songwriter and, for many years, one of Israel’s most famous news anchors and television "presenters” - sort of like Israel’s Johnny Carson. He is married to photojournalist and columnist Lehi Lapid who, although being the daughter and granddaughter of distinguished Orthodox rabbis, was recently accused of being a Messianic Jew. She sued the rabbi who made the original accusation, and almost immediately received a public apology.
in January 2012, Yair Lapid announced that he would leave the world of broadcast journalism and enter politics, quickly creating a new political party, the centrist יש עתיד (yesh atid, Hebrew for “there is a future.”) The move was timed to coincide with the general expectation in Israel for early elections to be held in the early fall of 2012.
A few days after Yesh Atid's party registration in early 2012, in a surprise move, Benjamin Netanyahu formed a national unity government. At the time it It was thought that Lapid's party would have to wait until late 2013 before it could participate in national elections. But in October 2012, following the departure of Kadima from Netanyahu's coalition over how to implement a Supreme Court decision ending the exemption from the military draft for the ultra-Orthodox, Netanyahu announced that elections would take place in late January 2013, thus affording Yesh Atid its first opportunity to run. In November 2012, Yesh Atid was polling an average of 11.6%, or 13–14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset (the Israeli Parliament). The January election results showed Lapid’s party winning an unexpected 19 seats, making Yesh Atid the second-largest party in the 19th Knesset. P.M. Netanyahu named Lapid his Finance Minister. The former journalist/talk-show host’s name was quickly getting known in international circles: In April 2013, Lapid appeared on Time magazine's list of the "100 Most Influential People in the World 2013" in the category “Leaders." The following month, he ranked first on the list of the "Most Influential Jews in the World" by The Jerusalem Post; he also was listed as one of the "Foreign Policy Global Thinkers of 2013.”
In his first decade as a politician, the man who came into nearly every secular Israeli’s living room on a nightly basis, went on to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs (2021-2022), Second Alternate Prime Minister (June 13, 2021-June 30, 2022), and Prime Minister (July 1, 2022-December 30, 2023). Lapid and his party have fought long and loud against corruption through their support of the “Nachshon Plan,” the imbalance of political favoritism shown to the ultra-Orthodox political parties in order to curry favor, and the absolute correctness of a "Two-party solution.”
Within days of Hamas’ swift and demoralizing attack on Israel, Yair Lapid announced that he would not join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz’s national emergency government, saying that he does not believe it will work with its current structure and membership. Lapid pointed to three issues:
The keeping of “extremists” in the hardline government;
A double security cabinet structure without clear lines of authority, and
The continued presence of those at fault for the “unpardonable failure” to prevent Saturday’s crushing Hamas terror attack, which triggered the ongoing war.
While saying that his Yesh Atid party will, without question, continue to support the war effort from outside the shared leadership of the so-called “Unity Government,” and will not vote against the Knesset confirmation of five National Unity party ministers being added to Netanyahu’s government, Lapid said that it’s still necessary to “take the extremists out of the government of extremists.”
Time and again, Yair Lapid has proven himself to be one of the very best, most eloquently effective and moving speakers in international politics. To hear his words, to feel his passion, is a humbling yet electrifying experience . . . if those two bipolar opposites are possible. I end with a video of a speech he delivered at a German railroad crossing on August 21, 2014. Despite the fact that the speech is now more than 9 years old, it has the power, the prescience and message of a message just completed in the early morning hours today. Like all truly great speeches, it has the power to both tug at the heartstrings and give steel to the spine. Lapid gave this speech twice: first in Hebrew with English subtitles, and next in English with Hebrew underscoring his words. What follows is the English version. And for those who And for those who, for whatever reason do not have access to YouTube, I have appended a transcript of the English version.
(My deep thanks to My Pal Al for sending me a copy of Lapid’s masterpiece. You are the best!)
A fatal blind spot for sheer evil
Good people refuse to accept the possibility that human beings could use children as human shields
The Holocaust causes us all to ask of ourselves the same question: What would I have done?
What would I have done if I was a Jew in Berlin in 1933, when Hitler rose to power? Would I have run? Would I have sold my house, my business? Removed my children from school in the middle of the year? Or would I have said to myself: it will pass, it is just momentary madness, Hitler says all these things because he is a politician seeking election. Yes, he’s anti-Semitic, but who isn’t? We’ve been through worse than this. It’s better to wait, to keep my head down. It will pass.
What would I do if I was a German in Berlin on the 18th October 1941, when the first train left this platform, heading East and on it 1,013 Jews – children, women, the elderly — all destined for death.
I don’t ask what I would have done if I was a Nazi, but what would I have done if I was an honest German man, waiting for his train here? A German citizen the same age I am now, with three children like mine. A man who educated his children on the values of basic human decency and the right to life and respect? Would I have remained silent? Would I have protested? Would I have been one of the few Berliners to join the anti-Nazi underground, or one of the many Berliners who carried on with life and pretended that nothing was happening?
And what if I was one of the 1,013 Jews on that train? Would I have boarded the train? Would I have smuggled my 18-year-old daughter to the northern forests? Would I have told my two sons to fight until the end? Would I have dropped my suitcase and started to run? Or would I have attacked the guards in the black uniforms and died an honorable, quick death instead of dying slowly of hunger and torture?
I think I know the answer. I think you do too.
None of the 1,013 Jews departing for their deaths fought the guards. Not them and not the tens of thousands who followed them from this place. Neither did my grandfather, Bela Lampel, when a German soldier took him from his home late at night on the 18th March 1944. “Bitte,” said his mother — my great-grandmother Hermine — to the German soldier. She slowly got down on her knees and hugged the soldiers boots. “Bitte, don’t forget that you also have a mother.” The soldier didn’t say a word. He didn’t know that from the bed, hiding under the duvet, my father was looking at him. A Jewish boy of 13 who over night became a man.
Why didn’t they fight? That is the question that haunts me. That is the question that the Jewish people have struggled with since the last train left for Auschwitz. And the answer – the only answer – is that they didn’t believe in the totality of evil.
They knew, of course, that there were bad people in the world, but they didn’t believe in total evil, organized evil, without mercy or hesitation, cold evil that looked at them but didn’t see them, not even for a moment, as human.
According to their murderers, they weren’t people. They weren’t mothers or fathers, they weren’t somebody’s children. According to their murderers, they never celebrated the birth of a child, never fell in love, never took their old dog for a walk at two in the morning or laughed until they cried at the latest comedy by Max Ehrlich.
That’s what you need to kill another man. To be convinced that he isn’t a man at all. When the murderers looked upon the people who departed from this platform on their final journey they didn’t see Jewish parents, only Jews. They weren’t Jewish poets or Jewish musicians, only Jews. They weren’t Herr Braun or Frau Schwartz, only Jews.
Destruction starts with the destruction of identity. It is no surprise that the first thing done to them, when they arrived at Auschwitz, was to tattoo a number on their arm. It is hard to kill Rebecca Grunwald, a beautiful, fair-haired 18-year-old romantic, but Jew number 7762 A is easy to murder. Yet it remains the same person.
Seventy-five years later, do we know any more? Do we understand more?
The Holocaust placed before Israel a dual challenge:
On the one hand it taught us that we must survive at any price, and be able to defend ourselves at any price. Trainloads of Jews will never again depart from a platform anywhere in the world. The security of the State of Israel and its citizens must forever be in our hands alone. We have friends, and I stand here among friends. The new Germany has proven its friendship to Israel time and again, but we must not, and we cannot, rely on anyone but ourselves.
On the other hand, the Holocaust taught us that no matter the circumstances we must always remain moral people. Human morality is not judged when everything is ok, it is judged by our ability to see the suffering of the other, even when we have every reason to see only our own.
The Holocaust cannot be compared, and must not be compared, to any other event in human history. It was, in the words of the author K. Zetnik, a survivor of Auschwitz, “another planet.” We must not compare, but we must always remember what we learned.
A war like the one we fight today, which looks likely to continue and which the civilized world — whether it wants to or not — will be a part of, causes the two lessons we learned from the Holocaust to stand opposite one another.
The need to survive teaches us to strike hard to defend ourselves.
The need to remain moral, even when circumstances are immoral, teaches us to minimize human suffering as much as possible.
Our moral test is not taking place in a sterile laboratory or upon the philosopher’s page. In the past weeks, the moral test put before us has taken place during intense fighting. Thousands of rockets were fired at our citizens and armed terrorists dug tunnels next to kindergartens with the aim of killing or kidnapping our children. Anyone who criticizes us must ask themselves one question: “What would you do if someone came to your child’s school with a gun in their hand and started shooting?”
Hamas, as opposed to us, wants to kill Jews. Young or old, men or women, soldiers or civilians. They see no difference, because for them we are not people. We are Jews and that is reason enough to murder us.
Our moral test, even under these circumstances, is to continue to distinguish between enemies and innocents. Every time a child in Gaza dies it breaks my heart. They are not Hamas, they are not the enemy, they are just children.
Therefore Israel is the first country in military history that informs its enemy in advance where and when it will attack, so as to avoid civilian causalities. Israel is the only country that transfers food and medication to its enemy while the fighting continues. Israel is the only country where pilots abandon their mission because they see civilians on the ground. And despite it all, children die, and children are not supposed to die.
Here in Europe, and elsewhere in the world, people sit in their comfortable homes, watching the evening news, and tell us that we are failing the test. Why? Because in Gaza people suffer more. They don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — that the suffering of Gaza is the main tool of evil. When we explain to them, time after time, that Hamas uses the children of Gaza as human shields, that Hamas intentionally places them in the firing line, to ensure they die, that Hamas sacrifices the lives of the young to win its propaganda war, people refuse to believe it. Why? Because they cannot believe that human beings — human beings who look like them and sound like them — are capable of behaving that way. Because good people always refuse to recognize the totality of evil until it’s too late.
Time after time we ask ourselves why people in the world prefer to blame us when the facts so clearly indicate otherwise. Across the world, fanatic Muslims are massacring other Muslims. In Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Nigeria more children are killed in a week than die in Gaza in a decade. Every week, women are raped, homosexuals are hung and Christians are beheaded. The world watches, offers its polite condemnation, and returns obsessively to condemning Israel for fighting for our lives.
Some of the criticism stems from anti-Semitism. It has raised its ugly head once more. To those people we say: we will fight you everywhere. The days when Jews ran away from you are over. We will not be silent in the face of anti-Semitism and we expect every government, in every country, to stand shoulder to shoulder with us and fight this evil with us.
Other critics, perhaps more enlightened in their own eyes, prefer to blame only us for what happens in Gaza because they know we are the only ones who listen. They prefer to focus their anger upon us not in spite of but because we are committed to the same human values which Hamas rejects – compassion for the weak, rationality, protection of gay people, of women’s rights, of the freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Let us not fool ourselves. Evil is here. It is around us. It seeks to hurt us. Fundamentalist Islam is an ultimate evil, and like the evil which came before it, has learned how to use all our tools against us: Our TV cameras, our international organizations, our commissions of inquiry and our legal system. Just as terror uses rockets and suicide bombers, it uses our inability to accept that someone would sacrifice the children of their people just to get a supportive headline or an eye-catching photograph.
Standing here, in this place, I want to say clearly that the leaders of Hamas, an anti-western, anti-Semitic terrorist organization, cannot be safe while they continue to target innocent civilians. Just as every European leader would do, just as the United States did with Osama Bin Laden, so we will pursue every leader of Hamas.
This is the evil which we all face and Israel stands at the front. Europe must know, if we will fail to stop them, they will come for you. We must do everything to avoid suffering and the death of innocents but we stand in the right place from which to say to the entire world: We will not board the train again. We will protect ourselves from total evil.
Thank you.
!לעום לא עוד
(Never Again!)
Copyright©2023 Kurt Franklin Stone