Opposition leader MK Yair Lapid spoke to an Israeli radio station this morning about the war in Gaza, the "day after," and the recent High Court decision annulling the Knesset"s controversial Basic Law to abolish the judicial "reasonableness standard."
Asked about the High Court ruling, Lapid said, "The court made the only ruling it could make under these conditions, and everyone shouted for a few hours what they were obviously going to shout, and that's the end of it. We will have to enact a Basic Law to regulate these things, and that needs to be done with a broad national consensus."
As for right now, Lapid said, "there are combat soldiers in Gaza and this doesn't interest them, and they're right."
Asked how the High Court decision related to potential efforts to prosecute Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the opposition leader said that the ruling Monday night "improved significantly the ability to protect our fighters."
"The international legal system respects independent legal systems," Lapid said. "The Israeli argument was, 'We don't need a babysitter, we know how to monitor ourselves independently, we have a separation of powers' – and today, too, we will be able to tell them the same thing."
Lapid: PA has a role to play in Gaza, Qatar and Turkey do not
Concerning "the day after" in Gaza, Lapid invoked the plan he presented earlier on in the war. "Unlike the government," the Yesh Atid head said, "I published a plan for the day after: the conditions for completing stage one, the conditions for completing stage two – everything was very organized.
"What I said was complicated, because it's a complicated situation, and I don't believe in people who offer simple, one-sentence solutions to complicated situations."
Lapid reiterated that, in his view, "the Palestinian Authority should be one component of the civilian apparatus that will manage the Strip on "the day after."
"There is something strange," Lapid said: "that [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu goes around and holds press conferences and says, 'We will not hand over Gaza to Abu Mazens rule.' [But] no one suggested that." Lapid emphasized that in the plan he proposed, "the security of Israel will remain in the hands of Israel, and we will not trust anyone."
The opposition leader invoked Israel's history with Hezbollah in Lebanon to demonstrate the importance of Israeli self-reliance for security: "We saw what happened in the North," he said. "There are supposed to be 15,000 UNIFIL soldiers in southern Lebanon. There are no binoculars in the world good enough to see them."
So, Lapid said, Israel will have to control security in Gaza "for years, until we know that Hamas has no possibility of returning to power." This will have to be a continuous effort, he said: "They will try to return. We need to eradicate them, [including] their governmental capacities, and then make sure they have no way to return."
Here, he cited a lesson of Israel"s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005: "Today there is no debate, the Disengagement should not have been done without reaching some kind of agreement. Now you have to reach a situation where you are building something together with the moderate Arab countries. The US should lead."
Thus, Lapid said, there is a role for the PA: "The Palestinian Authority has a civilian operation inside Gaza. It would be stupid not to use such an infrastructure, and they're not identified with Hamas. They should be a component in [a future arrangement] because without such a component, it wouldn't be possible to bring in the Saudis, or other Arab countries.
"I don't think Qatar and Turkey should be involved," he specified. "They are hostile countries today."
Lapid: Now is not the time to pick fights with Biden
Regarding the role of the United States in the war, Lapid said that "we need two main things from the Americans: time and advanced weapons."
He accused Netanyahu of playing politics with these necessities, saying that the relationship with the US "must not be jeopardized; it must not be sacrificed." But "Netanyahu knows that if he fights the Americans loudly it helps him in the base. In war, you don't do that. He started clashing with the Americans: completely unnecessary public clashes."
Lapid clarified that he did not blame Netanyahu's spats with the administration for the America's decision to withdraw the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had been deployed to the Middle East in the days after October 7. "I don't think that's why they took the ship out," he said, "I just think wen need to have a better and quieter dialogue with the Americans.
"I'll sit down with [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken on Friday," he said. "We will probably discuss it."
Also on the agenda for his meeting with Blinken is the situation in the North, Lapid said. Asked whether war with Hezbollah is inevitable, he answered that "if necessary, yes, but the political effort that the Americans are now making should be given a chance. Blinken is coming to the region; this is part of the effort.
"We need to understand," however, that "if the political effort does not succeed in keeping Hezbollah away from the northern border, Israel will have no choice but to do it by force. We will not allow the residents of Manara and Kiryat Shmona to live under this threat forever and ever."