"Fathers and Sons" is the name of a novel by Ivan Turgenev, a 19th-century Russian author. If I may say so, no other people outdo the Russian literary tradition. It was in Russia it appears that the motif of conservative fathers and revolutionary sons first appeared. The American cultural version is "liberal father, radical son." In Israel, in the current season, the senior political players are, in one way or another, walking down a path trodden by their fathers. President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Yair Lapid, if we adopt the literary allegory of the great Russian tradition, are the inheritors of political estates.
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Herzog inherited a fertile estate that begot great prodigies. His father Chaim was an outstanding diplomat and later president. His son Isaac often notes his father's interventions in the political system. Lapid walks the path that his father, Joseph "Tommy" Lapid, walked before him. But it was not an estate that he inherited, more like a shop or a restaurant.
Lapid the father was a senior journalist for Ma'ariv and over the years became a political functionary on the right wing of the map. He was the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority for some five years, during which he enforced the prohibition on interviewing representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Prior to that, as a journalist, he fought a bitter battle against broadcasting Ram Loevy's film Khirbet Hiza'a on TV. He claimed that the film version of S. Yizhar's novel telling the story of the expulsion of the residents of a fictional village of the same name in 1948 created associations between IDF soldiers and SS troopers in the Holocaust. In the same spirit, in the 1970s he wrote an allegorical story comparing Udi Adiv – an Israeli Jew convicted of spying for Syria – to Adolf Eichmann.
Lapid junior cites the values of freedom of expression, but he doesn't mean it. In the age of commercial television, Tommy Lapid is remembered as one of the fathers of populist television. He was a regular participant in the Israeli roundtable TV show, Popolitica.
As minister of justice, Lapid senior shouted from the Knesset dais: "How can you do such a thing? Isn't democracy precious to you? Do you want bureaucrats to dismiss prime ministers? Do you want to give the Attorney General the sole authority to fire a prime minister and dismiss a government? As we know, his son Yair on the other hand behaves exactly the opposite. For him, an indictment is a holy scripture.
Tommy Lapid was a Holocaust survivor. There is no doubt that this seeped down into the consciousness of his son Yair. But he doesn't appear to be someone who has learned the lessons of the Holocaust, rather he uses it as an embellishment for diplomatic meetings, such as with the German chancellor, or to initiate a crisis with the Poles. For him, both massacres in Africa and hatred of Israel in the West and the Orient all fall under the umbrella of antisemitism.
In the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, his father Benzion left him an estate that is an idea. The distance between the figure of the father – who in the 21st century still lived his disputes and those of his colleagues with President Chaim Weizmann and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion – and that of the son Benjamin, as well as of his two other sons, Yoni and Ido is enormous, and sometimes arouses astonishment.
Benzion never fired a rifle, but he did carry one on guard duty in the 1930s. His competitiveness was expressed in his writing. Benjamin was a combat soldier in modern Israel. He inherited a national view of problems. But his perceptions added to the heritage of his father, the historian, the element of economics together with modern American conservatism of the Ronald Reagan mold.
He combines Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky's ideas with the radicalism of Abba Ahimeir, and Aharon Aharonson's vision of the independent initiative. This is a great heritage but one that is despised by the left, which clearly sees it as being behind the populist nationalism of the Likud.
President Herzog occasionally notes the willingness of his father Chaim to jump headfirst into the political swamp to save drowning leaders. Herzog senior did this three times: First when he pushed for a national unity government with a rotation between the parties in 1984 – it was he who banged together the heads of then Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres of Labor.
The second was when he cut through the legal-security-political tangle of the Bus 300 Affair involving the death of Palestinians while being interrogated by Shin Bet security agency officials. Isaac Herzog claims that his father "saved the Shin Bet" by striking a clemency deal. The third time was when he pardoned the prisoners of the Jewish Underground. Herzog the son is proud of the contribution that his father made to the stability of Israeli society, and he is now hinting that he will push for similar political solutions.
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