Yesh Atid announced its full Knesset list on Sunday night at a press conference
in Shoham.
The party, led by Yair Lapid, also unveiled its official
campaign slogan, “We’ve come to change.”
Almost half of the top 20 people
on the list are women, something the party has emphasized in trying to
distinguish itself from other parties as being a “new kind of politics,” in
which they practice what they preach with more than a small symbolic quota of
women.
The top woman on the list is Yael German, mayor of Herzliya, who
has been strongwilled in defending the party against tough media
questions.
The list also includes a number of religious candidates,
including Rabbi Shai Piron at No. 2, Prof. Aliza Lavie at No. 7 and Rabbi Dov
Lipman at No. 17.
The list boasts two Ethiopian Israelis, Shimon Solomon
and Pnina Tamnu-Shata.
With current polls predicting a Yesh Atid
delegation of 10 seats, Solomon is just beyond the cut for getting a Knesset
seat, but is close enough to be a possible addition to the slowly growing
Ethiopian representation in the Knesset.
Tamnu-Shata is out of striking
distance, but still makes the composition of the top of the list more
diverse.
Solomon is also a representative of the South and rose higher on
the list from what had been predicted over the last month and after the
war.
The list also includes Salim Kador, who is Druse, at
No. 23.
Speaking after presenting the candidates, Lapid said the
problem with other parties and politics is that everyone says “you need an
enemy.”
The Yesh Atid leader said he rejected this style of politics,
noting “we don’t want to play” since if “we have any enemy, it’s cynicism,
people who see there is no reason to try to change, people who give [up], and
just say the state has fallen apart.”
Lapid worried aloud that,
“two-thirds of parents say they don’t care if their children leave Israel.” He
responded to this statistic as a “terrible number,” saying the country needs to
change.
Next, trying to stick to his attitude of doing things
differently, each candidate for Knesset introduced one of the other
candidates.
After each introduction, each candidate repeated that the
next candidate “came to change.”
Lapid described his list as “not looking
the same, from different backgrounds, disciplines and areas of the
country.”
But, he said, they were all united around the same beliefs “on
80 percent of the time” and in dialogue the “other 20% of the
time.”
Lapid said education problems are so severe that without change,
in the next generation “no one will be able to invent things like Iron Dome.” He
attacked by implication Tzipi Livni, complaining of politicians that only care
about getting public money.
Livni recently gained NIS 9 million in public
funding by taking seven current Kadima members of Knesset into her new
party.
Unlike his implied attack on Livni, he explicitly slammed
Construction and Housing Minister Ariel Attias for, as he described it,
undermining housing reforms to focus on his own constituency.
Hitting on
one of his regular points of the wastefulness of having so many ministers,
including those without portfolio, he appeared to express pity for Kadima leader
Shaul Mofaz, in that when he quit the government, he quit a “fake” ministry
where he “had no job.”
Lapid returned to his message of criticizing
haredim for not serving in the army, or at least different paths of national
service.
One path he mentioned was assisting Holocaust
survivors.
He said, “Ask the two rabbis in Yesh Atid if any rabbi could
look you in the eye and say that assisting Holocaust survivors is a waste of
Torah study time.”
Lapid next declared that Israel needs to stop
“pretending that there is no dispute with the Palestinians,” and that the
dispute requires action to resolve the situation.
Significant speculation
has surrounded Yesh Atid’s list since early elections were announced, with many
of the candidates being announced gradually.
But with the Likud and Labor
party lists set as of this past week, and the deadline for setting Knesset lists
only days away, Yesh Atid’s list is finally set in stone.
Media reports
on the list from around a month ago proved mostly accurate with a few small
changes.