Reporter’s Notebook: Lapid’s the tail. We’re the dog.
By LAHAV HARKOV
Yesh Atid privately updated reporters on coalition talks, and Yair Lapid denied it all on Facebook. Is this new politics?
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 US 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, in order to cover up a presidential .. 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.
We’ve been wagged.
On Wednesday night 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.
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? ..
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 a 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 Ha’aretz reporter Jonathan Lis describing the same experience and calling Lapid’s party “pathetic,” confirmed my sanity, but didn’t calm my nerves.
It occurred to me that this is all semantics. Last week, Lapid took to Facebook to say he isn’t 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 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