Yair Lapid's adviser: Democracy must be able to protect itself

Democracy must be able to protect itself from people who are fundamentally anti-democratic, author and political adviser Yair Zivan told Zvika Klein on The Jerusalem Post Podcast.

Zivan has served as an adviser to former prime minister Yair Lapid for close to a decade, and is the editor of the book The Centre Must Hold about the importance of the political center.

Despite Lapid's drop in the polls, Zivan praised him for his consistency in his time in politics.

"I think he's been actually one of the most consistent politicians in Israel. And I think if you read what he's written over the last decade, about his position on things, you'll see that there hasn't really been a shift. You also see that a lot of the time I think he's just ahead of ahead of the curve on on a lot of things that then people end up following, we can see some of that with Gaza now."

Refusing to sit with extremists to protect democracy

Despite Yesh Atid being a centrist party and leading the opposition, Lapid refrained from joining a unity government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Part of the reason for this, Zivan explained, is that while as a centrist he is open to other views from the political spectrum, that doesn't mean agreeing to sit in a coalition with extremists, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir's far-right Otzma Yehudit Party.

"I think democracy has to be able to protect itself from people who are fundamentally anti-democratic, and they wanted to tear down the system," he explained. He then contrasted this with the protests against the government's proposed judicial reform.

"The anti-judicial overhaul protests of 2023 were a protection of democracy," Zivan said. "They were a fundamentally liberal patriotic protest movement."

That doesn't mean compromises were inherently impossible.

"If the Likud had come to us in January 2023 and said, 'let's have have a serious conversation across the country about the kind of reforms that might make our judicial system better,' then we'll find I think, willing partners to have serious conversations. But it was very clear from Yariv Levin's first speech in January 2023, that that wasn't the goal," Zivan said. 

"This wasn't about reforming. It's about weakening and undoing... It was undermining liberal democracy [and] undermining the institutions. And we know from experience in other countries that you start with the judicial system, and then you move to the media, and then you move to civil society... So that's why I think that the fight against that was a fight for liberal democracy."