Yair Lapid Quotes
The settlers do not have a problem with the leftists but, rather, with Israelis who like settlers: Israelis who are unconcerned by the fact that national-religious youngsters are overtaking our elite units. Such Israelis actually appreciate the settlers for that.
Lapid, Yair. "The settlers' problem." Ynetnews, Yedioth Internet, 7 Jan. 2012.
From the latter part of the 20th century onward, religious nationalism was no longer a force for most religions and nations except Muslim countries. It was the only religion left where a large proportion of the adherents saw no distinction between the religion and the government. Nations that had separation of church and state were not conducive to the extreme fundamentalist form of Islam where the Secular Leader and the Religious leader was to be embodied as a single person. As a result Islamic religious nationalists argued for a Theocracy and at times fought for it with violent means. The secular government typically, to curtail the violence and prevent a religious takeover, often outlawed the extreme religious Islamic parties. While Aslan cites the Muslim Brotherhood failure in Egypt as a desirable outcome, the only way the other forces of Egyptian society could prevent the Islamists from taking over turning the country into a theocracy was to forcefully repress the extremists. The Turkish outcome was much better, but there was the threat of repression of the Justice and Development Party when it won a majority control of the government. There were explicit threats that if it tried to weaken the secular nature of the government as Ataturk had formulated it, the military would come “out of the barracks” and oust the government as they had done before. There were nations like China which persecuted religions such as certain forms of Christianity, but those religions were not fighting for religious nationalism. They only wished the freedom to practice their religion and had no program or theology that argued for Christianizing the government. The Tamil Hindus of Sri Lanka did not want a Hindu government and were perfectly free to practice their religion. The problem was that they felt that there was systemic social and economic discrimination against the Tamils and they fought for independence—not of a Hindu state, but of a secular, nondiscriminatory state of equal opportunity.
The “radicals” refer to the extremely conservative, religiously-oriented Israelis. To them the only real and important element is the land that God gave to the Jewish people. They see the State as artificial and whose only legitimate role is to protect and defend the land of Israel. God has ordained the laws in the Talmud—the first 5 Books of the Old Testament. They do not believe in democracy but seek a Hebrew Theocracy of the Ancient Jews before they made the error of having kings. Some of them opposed the civil government of Israel when the country was founded via a UN resolution and a few would not even defend the new country under a civil government. The relative moderates see Israel as a nation state where the land of Israel can be changed, negotiated, traded as other nations do with their borders. One irony is no one knows exactly the borders of the land which God gave to the Jews and this is why archeology is so politically important in Israel compared to other countries.
Yair Lapid is an Israeli politician and former journalist serving as chairman of the Yesh Atid party and opposition leader in the Knesset. He served as Minister of Finance from 2013 to 2014. Before entering politics in 2012, Lapid was an author, TV presenter and news anchor. The centrist Yesh Atid party, which he founded, became the second-largest party in the Knesset by winning 19 seats in its first legislative election in 2013. The greater-than-anticipated results contributed to Lapid's reputation as a leading centrist.
