No picture(Photo: Walla! system, screenshot)
Beyond the vulgar position of three members of one family in too many centers of power in Israeli society – Tommy in the state's government, Yair in the state's channel and newspaper, and Lihi in its network of local newspapers – the question arises: what is the precise reason why the Lapid family arouses revulsion? After all, Lihya, for example, is a nice and handsome girl who has recovered nicely from an overly publicized family crisis. Yair is also a polite man who manages to disguise his age impressively. Tommy is an older man who likes to tell jokes and eat sausage. None of them are complete fools, all three are not evil people, presumably.
What arouses the aversion to them is the attitude that characterizes all three of them - dishonesty about their situation. Let's start with Yair. As someone who last week was not shy about advising Peres "not to enter government" without his father's party; as someone who advertises a bank and hosts a TV show; As the author of the most expensive column in the press, a column in which he declared last week that he was one of the founders of the revolution of the summer of '79 (although it was difficult to understand exactly which revolution he was referring to; I hope not Khomeini in Iran); As someone who is simply amazing how he managed to do so much in relation to his talent; As each of these things separately and all together, Yair must stop being nice. It's just nice people who don't get to places where Lapid has his foot pedaling.
His deliberate niceness is the point of gravity of his aversion to Lapid's work. The fact that there is no column in which he does not make sure to present himself as a villain, the fact that he ignores the paradoxical dimension that exists in a person who so blatantly externalizes his "natural" shyness, the fact that in advertisements he seriously offers the position that Israeliness is me – all this raises reservations because a modest person has not written about himself for years in the newspaper, does not run to the auditions required to get a TV show, He doesn't demand that Peres help his father, the average Israeli doesn't earn thousands of shekels for a few hundred words per newspaper, the average Israeli doesn't publish a bank – he wants to burn the manager. At its highest level, Yair's modesty is actually arrogance.
Lapid's niceness is also destructive to himself. Because if he had given up the "I'm a simple guy who just happens to make it big," we'd find that his column is written with the kind of talent that would at least allow him to get into Walla!, that his TV show is casual but harmless, that he has the right to make money from commercials and live the good life with the right connections. Many things could still be said about him, but not aversion to dishonesty.
Lihi Lapid and Immanuel Kant
No picture(Photo: Walla! system, screenshot)
The second side of the story is Lihya, who suffers from a similar symptom. When I think of Mrs. Lapid's musings, I always think of Immanuel Kant. Although it is preoccupied with creams, belly shirts and tanning machines and he hardly left the house to establish his aesthetic judgment thesis, it was Kant who argued that bad criticism is not 700 deadly words but criticism that you have trouble expressing, find no words for. Indeed, to be fair, Lihya doesn't have a bad word to say.
What can you argue about the column where it was said that belly shirts for older women are not aesthetically pleasing? How can one resist the gentle voice that emanates from its ranks and seeks to maintain a healthy relationship and family? Without a doubt, Lia is a good girl. The only problem is why write to us about it every week in the first person? And why Lihya? My aunt also dislikes belly shirts.
What's more, all the bourgeois dreams she longs for in her column are already fulfilled: her husband is wealthy, she has a pleasant job, the children are educated, she can apply for the title of deputy prime minister. As with her husband, instead of admitting that Danin is embodied in her personality and lifestyle, the gap between Liha's insistence on being the average Israeli girl and her ability to derive from her skills – which are indeed average – what hundreds of truly talented girls will never be able to achieve is repugnant.
Makeover
No picture(Photo: Walla! system, screenshot)
I wanted to end with Tommy's ridiculous elitism—notice how, instead of saying that "only a donkey doesn't change his mind," he preferred "as Victor Hugo said, only the bull is always consistent"—who doesn't want to realize that only an ignorant and completely uncultured person scorns everything else, as is believed in "Change." Wanted. But what happened yesterday provides a significant twist in the Lapid family's plot. The fact that the mistress of the family retracted his conditioned reflex towards every Jew with a beard marks, hopefully, the beginning of the process of removing the mask from the face of the family.
Now that Tommy confirms that he, too, is just a politician – either because he changed his promise to voters, or because he now admits that rejecting the ultra-Orthodox was just a slogan rather than a reasoned ideology – Meir and Lihi should also be expected to start writing for what they are: rich, stilted, lucky and well-connected. Definitely not average Israelis. Not sure this will eliminate the aversion, but we would certainly appreciate the honesty.
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