Ahead of an English “town hall” event in Jerusalem tomorrow night, MK Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, talks up his recent push to court Anglo voters.
Though elections are not officially scheduled to take place before November 2019, they’re perpetually anticipated to be bumped up, and Lapid is hoping to influence the “reasonable” English-speakers, most of whom hail from “well-established democracies,” he tells The Times of Israel in an interview.
Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid talks to US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman at a ceremony for new immigrants from North America at Ben Gurion airport on August 15, 2017 (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
“For those people, the left is not national enough, meaning not Jewish enough. And the right is dangerously filled with contempt to[ward] the basic establishments of democracy,” he says. “And we are a national liberal party, meaning we understand Israel as first and foremost a Jewish state and it doesn’t contradict, to us, democratic values.”
Moreover, Lapid adds, immigrants “tend to take the country more personally. Because it’s not the place they were born, it’s the choice they made.”
The full interview with Lapid will be published on The Times of Israel later Tuesday.
— Marissa Newman
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