As a novice politician in late 2012, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid tried to target the political center, but with a wink and a nudge to the right.

He had lofty goals, too. He wanted to be prime minister one day, and he believed that the only way to achieve that in Israel was by moving voters from the soft right to the center. He fought hard against the BDS movement to boycott Israel, and made a big deal of every missive he fired off to some international organization or other. He built up a reputation as a patriot with hawkish security views, too. So, for instance, in his 2020 campaign, he announced that, “On our watch, the next time they shoot missiles at Israeli citizens, the heads of Hamas won’t be getting anymore suitcases stuffed with dollars. No, they’ll be getting a missile, delivered straight to their homes.”

For years, he also fought back against anyone who described his Yesh Atid party as center-left. He asked journalists personally not to refer to it that way, claiming that it was only “centrist,”  and that he actually grew up in a rightwing home. He often told people that his father, former Minister Joseph Tommy Lapid, supported iconic Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who won the hearts of the Mizrahim and other underrepresented sectors of the population in the 1970s.

Every so often, he would even lash out against Arab members of Knesset, intending to associate the group with the actions of former Knesset member Haneen Zoabi of the Arab Balad party. Zoabi earned notoriety back in 2010, for participating in the flotilla to Gaza, together with various Palestinian organizations.