Lapid in the Knesset: "10% can not threaten with civil war"

Yesh Atid chairman, Yair Lapid, marked a personal history today (Monday) in the afternoon, when he delivered his first speech in the Knesset.

"I stand here today with respect opposite the task before us. A few days ago here in the plenum I said 'I'm committed and I take this obligation as a life mission, precisely because it is said during difficult days for Israel", Lapid began.

At the beginning of his remarks he referred to various statements made by Orthodox personalities that forced recruitment experience will lead to civil war: "We cannot ignore the discussion of equality burden; there will not be a civil war here. 10% of the population can not threaten a civil war on the other 90%."

"We are in the midst of a crisis, and the sooner we recognize this crisis, the faster the repair. This is an economic crisis - but not limited to, a social crisis - but not limited to, a political crisis - but not only. Because first of all, what is broken, it lying here broken into pieces, it is the ability to act as a sovereign state against the groups that compose it."

"State sovereignty is a whole consisting of its parts. We are different people, Orthodox, religious and secular, Jews and Muslims and Christians, men and women, rich and poor, immigrants and veterans, and there is beauty in this colorful and complex mosaic, it has intellectual power and I would not want to live in a country where everyone came out of the same production line. Instead of what unites us it divides us. They have caused the paralysis of governance and political impotence."

"We need to keep at all costs on what unites us. Consolidation cannot exist if you do not know the basic principle of democracy and the right of the state to act according to the decision of the majority."

"This is not just a theoretical discussion of the future of Israel. It touches the deepest fears, deepest tensions. Yet precisely because of that the public elected us to sit in this house to fight those fears, to bring them real solutions to problems that rip the society. We never came to create a rift, but to heal the existing rift. The rift is already there - we are torn apart in school, the military, and the labor market. It is time to admit that there is a gaping wound in the heart of Israeli society, and it's time to heal."

We must restore the country to its resolution capability. Sovereign should return to act like a sovereign. Our task is to imagine together how the State of Israel should look. Is it too much to imagine a country where every Orthodox child know English and secular kids know a page of gemara? Is to excessive imagining a country that leads the world and remembers to help an orphan and the widow and the stranger who walks through its gates? Is it excessive imagining a country whose interior is not hatred of the other, but the love of man? I firmly believe that. I believe in the State of Israel and our ability to create here a model that we can all be proud of."

Lapid ended with a proposal "we should recognize that a crisis of statehood has returned. It returned because we have lost our faith in the power of the state to act, make decisions, to report honestly and courageously before the groups that make it up and tell them that we have clear rules of right and wrong. Women are sent to sit at the back in the bus in Jerusalem and the state no longer knows what to say - if it goes on tomorrow, there will be no bus, because there are rules and laws apply to everyone."

Who was your grandfather?

After Yair Lapid's speech, Deputy Education Minister, Menachem Eliezer Moses of Yahadut Hatorah rose to the lectern.

Since it is acceptable at the Knesset that the one who speaks after the speaker who gave his debut speech, the MK congratulates him; Moses congratulated him in a fascinating way.

Moses began by detailing the genealogy of Lapid: "Your grandfather, David Giladi," he said, "was born in Austria - Hungary and was named David Klein, his father Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Klein, was from a family of 18 people. The father of Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Klein was Rabbi Eliyahu Klein who was the son of Rabbi Shmuel Shmelke Klein, the author of 'Zror Hachaim', learned in all the yeshivas."

And here Moses turned to Lapid and said: "Look at what good came from a family of 18 people and you want to cut benefits and encourage families with little children."
The key phrase here in the Knesset is: What you see from here you do not see from there ", he said, and therefore I was surprised that your speech was based on the crisis in state and lack of a future that comes to your understanding, from lack of courage of the rule of the majority against the minority, you chose to ignore the inequality in the burden of the education system in Israel. You chose to emphasize and draw that the minority controls the majority, the minority exploits the majority, I will have to correct you and show you data which you did not see from there and my fervent hope that you will see them here."

Moses also referred as deputy minister of education to the secular education fruit and core curriculum studies; he cited data on drug use and violence among students and said: "These are the fruits of the education system of the State of Israel – with core curriculum."

As for the recruitment Moses claimed that the IDF does not need thousands of haredi troops and is unable to absorb them and warned that "if you enlist the ultra-Orthodox to none orthodox units, your children will become Baalei Teshuva."
"Do you really believe that a hundred thousand yeshiva students can be drafted by force?" - Wondered Moses.

"Let us find the unifying rather than divisive, while half a million people chose to vote for you, but the other, a similar number chose to vote for the ultra-Orthodox parties - Shas and Yahadut Hatorah. There is no Torah like the Torah of Eretz Yisrael and we have no right to exist in this country without Torah," he concluded.

'בחדרי' גם ברשתות החברתיות - הצטרפו!