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AMOTZ ASA-EL:
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The new politics

Tommy Lapid has finally proved that an Israeli political center not only exists, but can actually be transformed into political energy, mass, and light

"You’re a caricature of Michael Jackson!‘ screamed talk-show star Yosef ’Tommy" Lapid in a typically witty, snappy, and well-aimed broadside at zany pop singer Aviv Gefen.

However, it was the immensely popular Gefen’s swift reply — "and you are a caricature of Archie Bunker" — that stuck.

Less than a decade later, the stocky, conservative, sharp-tongued journalist-turned-politician — whose resemblance to Bunker is indeed striking — has long ceased to be a caricature.

In fact, he has come to represent a revolution that is by far the year 5763’s most central political development, as well as an impressive combination of expediency, perseverance, vision, and poetic justice.

The Yugoslav-born Holocaust survivor — who has written best-selling cookbooks and travelogues during his fruitful decades as a columnist with the Ma’ariv daily — has proven that his improbable entry at retirement age into the political fray was neither a pompous chef’s experimental dish nor an adventurous nomad’s trek into the dark. If anything, it was a brilliant move reminiscent of Lapid’s accomplishments as a chess master.

Today, less than half a decade after entering the Knesset, Lapid is largely the cause, symbol, and linchpin of a new political order. Had it not been for his leadership of Shinui, the post-1977 haredi presence in government would not have ended this year, and the generation-long parity between Likud and Labor would still have dominated our political life.

Lapid’s success has been, more than anything else, his seizure of the political moment. That moment, in turn, has been about the demise of the post-’67 ideological discourse and the rise of new social classes that Israel’s traditional political structure has ignored.

WHEN LAPID first entered the Knesset in 1996, it was in the aftermath of the tiny, economically conservative Shinui faction’s secession from the ultra-liberal Meretz Party. At that time, today’s pervasive disenchantment with the Oslo process had yet to take root, though Shinui would later capitalize on it dramatically.

Shinui’s decision to once again run independently for the Knesset (it had last done so in 1984, when it won three seats) took place when Binyamin Netanyahu was still prime minister. However, the early election imposed on the political system by the far-Right’s abandonment of Netanyahu after the Wye Plantation Agreement caught Shinui unprepared, and polls predicted its extinction. That is when the party’s leader at the time, Avraham Poraz, offered Shinui’s leadership to the famously telegenic Lapid.

The result was a solid six Knesset seats, or 5 percent of the electorate, on a par with veteran religious parties and the star-studded Center Party that included at the time a former finance minister, defense minister, and chief of General Staff.

That Lapid could conceivably attract votes was universally accepted, but the conventional wisdom was that he would merely help the party siphon off the kind of anti-religious electorate that had previously made political creations like Tsomet rise meteorically only to soon vanish like vapor.

And then came the current war.

Having himself been previously identified with the Right — and having for several years during the Menachem Begin era even headed the Israel Broadcast Authority — Lapid was never an Oslo enthusiast, though he was prepared to give its formula a chance.

Fortunately for him, when the current war broke out he and Shinui were out of power, having repeatedly resisted pressures to join the government. The reason he did not join — the demand that the haredim first leave the government or be drafted — had nothing to do with the state of the peace process. However, Lapid could convincingly claim to have had no role in the events that led to the current war.

Now Shinui was not only the latest haredi-basher but also a voice of balance in a discourse previously dominated by Labor’s and Likud’s ideological doctrines. More than any other political entity in Israel, Shinui came to represent that post-ideological attitude that says it will do vis-à-vis the Palestinians whatever works.

LAPID’S HAWKISH pragmatism, which backs — for instance — targeted killings with no compunction and refuses to demonize the settlers, but at the same time is prepared to engage in massive territorial compromises, has generated an electoral bonanza in the form of 15 Knesset seats. In the coalition subsequently assembled by Ariel Sharon, he soon established himself as the very same "tip of the scale" that the haredim once were for a succession of Sharon’s predecessors. He was indispensable for the passage of Netanyahu’s economic plan, and his was also the crucial vote that allowed the attempt on Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin’s life.

Indeed, Lapid has come to embody the centrism it was once argued Israelis refused to embrace.

In reality, the current war has served for many Israelis as proof that since soon after 1967, their politicians had been wasting precious political energy, time, and capital debating utopian alternatives concerning the territories.

Thousands of Israelis have grown disillusioned with both the Greater Israel and New Middle East visions that the big parties had preached to them.

For them, Lapid became a natural default.

Still, it is doubtful Lapid would have been my choice for Israeli of the Year had he merely made the most of one political moment. The fact is that the success to which he has led Shinui represents a deeper social undercurrent, namely the rise of a new, assertive, and unabashed bourgeoisie.

IN A COUNTRY whose younger generation admires entrepreneurship, worldliness, and profit-making, there is little patience left for the simplicity, chastity, and at times near-asceticism that Israel’s founding fathers passionately preached.

Labor’s rank-and-file membership, not to mention the leaders, had long abandoned that socialist ethos, but they could never formally admit that; it is, after all, their raison d’être.

Shinui gladly did the very opposite by storming Israel’s urban, yuppie, and plutocratic bastions and declaring a là Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street: "Greed is good." Hence the party’s staunch support for Netanyahu’s struggle against the Vikki Knafo phenomenon, and its desire to cut the middle classes’ tax rates.

Lurking behind this effective message is the rapid absorption into Israel’s social fabric of the Russian immigration, whose aversion for socialism is famous and whose commitment to veteran political parties in minimal. They, like the younger Israeli electorate that feels economically solid, often prefer politicians who talk about lower tax rates to ones who talk about higher welfare wages.

In sum, the Lapid revolution combines a cultural common denominator among people fed up with haredi power, an economic call to the emancipation of a newly confident middle class, and an impatience with a political elite whose ideas about the Palestinians have all proven unworkable at best, disastrous at worst.

Whether he and his colleagues manage to transform their success into a long-term political reality remains to be seen.

What is already clear, however, is that under Lapid’s leadership the Israeli center has finally brought forth an alternative to the time-honored regime of Labor-Likud parity and haredi king-making, and matured into an ideological, social, and parliamentarian force to contend with. For that, Lapid deserves to be Israeli of the Year 5763.