Israel’s Bennett and Lapid partners, but still rivals

Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid flew to Morocco Aug. 11 to attend the reopening of Israel’s mission there. Since then, he has posted an almost endless stream of touching photos and texts to mark the historic occasion. He seems to have captured everything, from boarding the plane to landing in Rabat, and from the official reception that he received to the signing of new cooperation agreements between the two countries. Lapid ended his successful first day in Morocco with a video clip featuring him. It had all the markings of a promotional video, with all his best photos and selections from his speeches about the importance of peace, set to upbeat music.

There was, however, one thing missing from Lapid’s social media feed on that historic day. There was no mention of the coronavirus, even though the devastating fourth wave has begun to claim more victims in Israel. There was not even any mention of the enormous strain on the country’s hospitals. Then again, there was no mention of the coronavirus in Lapid’s online accounts in the days leading up to his Moroccan adventure. Instead, he congratulated Olympic gold medalist Linoy Ashram and reported that Israel sent airplanes to Greece to help fight the forest fires ravaging the country.

This is, of course, no coincidence. Lapid is an experienced politician and a top-notch campaigner. It should come as no surprise that he is doing everything he can to distance himself from the emerging fiasco in the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He is trying to establish his reputation as a statesman, leaving Prime Minister Naftali Bennett almost all alone in confronting the national health crisis. While Lapid was cutting ribbons in Rabat, Bennett was trying to reduce the damage caused by his two-month-long strategy of ignoring the virus, which he adopted as soon as he entered office. This approach was not just a failure. Experts in the Ministry of Health have some chilling predictions about what still lies ahead, including forecasts of thousands of serious cases of the disease in just a few weeks’ time. Bennett’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of content intended to present him to the public as being level-headed and cool as he engages with the virus and maintains control of this precarious situation. They show him encouraging the elderly to go get a third dose of the vaccine.

Lapid and Bennett seem to be following two separate agendas in two parallel universes. In fact, it would appear to an onlooker that the health crisis brought on by the coronavirus affects only one side of the equation. The problem with this is that these two men promised two months ago that they planned to offer Israelis a new model of leadership, based on mutual cooperation and support.