In a matter of months, Yair Lapid has turned from heartthrob television news anchor into a rising star of Israeli politics, leading a new centrist party into elections on Jan. 22. Lapid, 49, may prove an attractive coalition partner for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, which is widely forecast to lead the next…
Loverboy Bibi is at it again. Last year we caught Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kissing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Now he’s locking lips with Israeli Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich. Well, not exactly. Back in November 2011 Benetton photoshopped the embrace between Bibi and Abu Mazen as part of its controversial UNHATE ad campaign….
A TV personality-turned-politician whose centrist party could be a key player in Israel’s parliament after elections made a bid for right-wing voters on Tuesday with a call for Palestinians to accept some Israeli West Bank settlements. Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party gave his first speech on Israel’s relations…
Israel’s political map is about to upended when Netanyahu and Liberman go on television at 2 p.m. Eastern time to announce a joint Knesset run. They’re apparently not merging their parties but forming a joint list. The aim is to ensure that Bibi ends up with the largest Knesset bloc after the January 22 elections,…
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called early elections, he cast the Iranian nuclear threat as the primary issue facing Israel—and analysts predicted the vote would turn on voters’ fears of war. But if Netanyahu’s would-be opponents have anything to say about it, the January 22 election could be more about the price of cottage cheese…
Former TV journalist and newly minted politician Yair Lapid’s address to the Rabbinical Assembly’s National Convention in Atlanta yesterday got a lot of attention. In his remarks, he emphasized that he would work for equality for all religious movements in Israel — something that made the Conservative rabbis in the audience smile. But another politician…
The Likud-Kadima agreement to form a unity government and cancel the early election makes all the sense in the world for Kadima. It’s arguably the smartest move by any Israeli peace advocate in a long time. Newly minted Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, who ousted Tzipi Livni in a primary upset just two weeks ago, inherited…
For Yair Lapid, things tend to work out well. He’s handsome, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. He’s an author, screenwriter and one-time actor. Until recently he was a popular columnist for the best-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot, but then he left to enter politics. Again, this move went super-smoothly — before he…
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