Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi formed an alliance in coalition talks, and have been
saying for weeks that they want to focus on “essential, meaningful” policy
issues, not who gets which ministry. However, the clock is ticking and there’s a
little over a week left for a government to be formed. It made sense that they’d
get to the “dirty” stuff at this point, and that a party official would confirm
it.
Why, then, did Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid publicly deny it all? In
the film Wag the Dog, reporters breathlessly cover a war between the United
States and Albania, using a heartbreaking clip of a sad and beautiful peasant
girl. The war is a ruse – manufactured by a political spin doctor portrayed by
Robert DeNiro and a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman – designed to
cover up a presidential sex scandal. The peasant girl is an American actress in
front of a green screen.
“Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is
smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog,”
the movie’s tagline went.
After Wednesday night’s political games, it’s
clear that Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid is the tail. The public – voters who put
their faith in him, hoping for “new politics” – and journalists – desperate for
any information from coalition talks taking place behind closed doors – are the
dog.
We’ve been wagged.
On Wednesday night, I wrote the top
political story for The Jerusalem Post, confident of its veracity: Attorney-
General Yehuda Weinstein said it’s legal for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
to save the Foreign Ministry for MK Avigdor Liberman, but Lapid wants the
position.
Netanyahu offered the Finance Ministry to Lapid, but Lapid has
a pact with Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett, who wants the
portfolio.
At a quarter to midnight, I got a call from a top Yesh Atid
official. The kind of official that spends hours with Lapid each day. The kind
that has been feeding me and countless other reporters ostensibly accurate
information for months.
“Yesh Atid, Bayit Yehudi and Kadima formed a
bloc. That’s 33 MKs – two more than Likud Beytenu. We want the Foreign Ministry
and the Finance Ministry, and if we get it, we’ll support Netanyahu as prime
minister for the next four-plus years,” she said.
I repeated the
information back to make sure I understood it correctly, and then tried to
contact a Bayit Yehudi spokesman for confirmation, to no avail.
I was
left with a dilemma: The newspaper was going to print at any minute. Should I
run with the story or ignore it? I decided to frantically call the Post offices
and tell them to stop the presses. After all, Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi have
had an alliance for weeks now, and have steadfastly kept to it. This was “new
politics,” as Bennett and Lapid would say. They hadn’t double-crossed each other
once.
It’s important to note that the story that the Post ran quoted the
Yesh Atid official almost word-for-word.
Reporter Rina Matzliach, who
wrote the story for Channel 2 News’ website, did the same, but added in one
little word – “ultimatum” – and then everything went haywire.
An hour
later, it was too late to stop the presses a second time, when the same Yesh
Atid source e-mailed me Lapid’s Facebook status on the issue.
“I saw the
stories that Naftali Bennett and myself are giving an ultimatum to the prime
minister on the issue of portfolios. It isn’t true, and it isn’t
dignified. Netanyahu forms the government, and no one is giving him an
ultimatum. This is a transparent attempt to distract from the real issues,”
Lapid wrote.
Bennett also took to Facebook to deny the existence of an
ultimatum, writing, “There is nothing like that. We’re working hard to help the
prime minister form a new government that will work for the people of
Israel.”
“Dumbfounded” would be the best word to describe my reaction.
Was I crazy? Did I misunderstand the Yesh Atid source? A tweet from Haaretz
reporter Jonathan Lis describing the same experience and calling Lapid’s party
“pathetic,” confirmed my sanity, but failed to calm my nerves.
Facebook
is a tool that both Bennett and Lapid have used wisely since their election
campaigns began last year. Members of the social network feel that they’re
getting the “truth” directly from the source when they read what party leaders
have to say without going through a middleman – a.k.a. reporters. Yet,
here they were taking advantage of the public’s faith in that direct
communication in order to be dishonest.
It occurred to me that this is
all semantics. Last week, Lapid told his Facebook followers that he is not
boycotting haredim. However, he does not want to sit in a government with Shas
or UTJ. In this case, he wants his bloc to get the foreign and finance
portfolios, or else. But he won’t use the word “ultimatum.”
The next
morning, the Yesh Atid official confirmed as much, saying that just because the
parties are aligned and making demands doesn’t mean it has to be called an
“ultimatum.”
“So what you told me last night is correct?” I said,
repeating the information she had given me 10 hours earlier.
The response
was an emphatic yes.
So this is “new politics”: Not using loaded words,
like “ultimatum” and “boycott,” but doing exactly what they entail, while
covering it up by talking about values.
Lapid played us all; the tail
wagged the dog. At least now we know the rules of the game.
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