Lapid laments growing racism among Israeli Jews, but won’t say he’ll sit with Ra’am

WASHINGTON — Opposition chairman Yair Lapid laments growing racism against Israeli Jews, while still stopping short of saying that he’d be willing to sit in a coalition with Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas.

Lapid is asked during an onstage interview at the Atlantic Council in Washington whether he’d form another government with the chairman of the Arab party that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.

He responds by insisting that Abbas’s party won’t be needed because the Jewish-majority opposition parties will win enough seats in the October 27 elections to form a coalition on their own. Just about every poll taken in recent months has suggested otherwise.

Lapid then goes on to lament what he calls a “new kind of Jewish racism against peaceful Arab citizens of Israel,” pledging to quickly address the issue if he returns to the coalition as the No. 2 in former prime minister Naftali Bennett’s Together party.

“We need to make sure that the needs of 20% of the Israelis are being taken care of in education, health and everything else,” he adds.

Lapid goes on to claim that he’s discussed the matter with Abbas himself, that the Ra’am chairman “seems to understand better than some of my Jewish friends… that maybe it’s time for a coalition that will be made of only Zionist parties.”

Commenting on rampant settler violence in the West Bank, Lapid says a government he would help lead would immediately deploy two battalions and 300 police officers to the territory in order to crack down on the phenomenon.

He stops short of saying that he would push for dismantling the hundred-plus illegal outposts that have been established over the past three years from which much of the settler violence has disseminated.

Lapid says the current government isn’t capable of addressing settler violence because it includes senior ministers, such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who support the “terrorists” carrying out these attacks in the West Bank.