Our person of the year 5781, unlike five others over the past decade, does not hail from the Arab world.
Yes, the Middle East bubbled in the elapsing year, too, the flashpoint now shifting to Lebanon, whose bankruptcy might result in starvation. Still, Lebanon’s meltdown does not affect the rest of the region and is not one person’s doing.
The rest of the region also didn’t produce anyone who personified its wrath, despair or hope, the way Tunisian grocer Mohammed Abouazizi, drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi or peacemaking Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed did when they became our persons of the year, respectively, in 5771, 5775 and last year.
Events also didn’t justify the selection of a cultural hero, like our person of the year 5770, Nobel laureate Ada Yonat.
Yes, the year did produce a crop of athletic achievements, topped by two gold medals in the Tokyo Olympics and another four (so far) in the Paralympic Games. However, while inspiring, these accomplishments were overshadowed by the year’s defining events.
THE CENTRAL experience of the year was the same pandemic that dominated 5780. Within it, the main events were the arrival of the vaccination and its failure so far to fully defeat the coronavirus.
And so, with this medical drama still far from its end, there is no individual related to the pandemic – a scientist, say, or a public administrator or a politician – crownable as our person of the year. In victory’s absence, we might have chosen a generic symbol of mankind’s daily struggle with this scourge – the nurse, perhaps.
That would have been a sound choice, had the year not included pivotal political events that sure did star personal heroes. The first of these was last fall’s political change of power in the US.
Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, and the assault on Capitol Hill that redoubled its drama, will surely be recalled as big events in American history, and even in world history. However, Trump did not shape the year during which he was mostly removed from power. Trump can therefore not be our person of the year 5781, for the same reason that in 5776 he had to be our person of the year.
One might therefore have opted for Trump’s archrival, Joe Biden, whether because he unseated Trump or because he is so personally associated with the year’s main geopolitical event, the American retreat from Afghanistan. Yet neither of these justifies Biden’s nomination.
Electorally, Biden’s victory, while clear, still failed to remove Trump’s echo and shadow from America’s public sphere. As for Afghanistan, while the event supplied the year’s biggest drama, it cannot be attributed to Biden alone, since he merely completed what was set in motion by his predecessor.
And so, since our person of the year will this time be neither Arab nor American or any other foreigner, and since his or her claim to fame will be neither cultural nor pandemic, our choice will be an Israeli, and this person’s relevance will be associated with the year’s main Israeli event – the end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership.
THE POLITICAL transition that took place last spring is not a pivotal event because of what its leaders will do, which remains to be seen, but because of what they brought to an end.
At the center of this era stood one man who dominated Israel’s political, economic, social, military and diplomatic events for a dozen years. Sometime toward this era’s protracted twilight, its hero began sowing social hatred while clashing with the judiciary, police and media and leading the entire political system to stagnation, underscored by multiple snap elections followed by budgetary paralysis and violated political vows.
Last June, this steady erosion of our national institutions’ authority and the political system’s stability was finally halted. This cathartic breakthrough happened thanks to many people, but one man made it happen more than the rest: Yair Lapid.
The 57-year-old Lapid has been in politics for less than a decade, having worked until his late forties as a columnist, author, playwright, talk-show host and newscaster. Judging by what he did this year, this political novice learned his new vocation well enough to accomplish what others did not deliver during political careers two, three, and also four times longer than his.
In cobbling together an eclectic coalition the likes of which Israel had never seen, Lapid displayed leadership, nobility, inventiveness and generosity that offered our politically perplexed society some long overdue inspiration.
The nobility and leadership were in his volunteering to take fewer cabinet seats than the coalition’s other partners, relative to his faction’s size, and also to give away all senior ministries except foreign affairs. This magnanimity created the atmosphere of compromise and pragmatism without which the new government would never have been born.
The inventiveness was in bringing together rivals as bitter as ultra-hawk Avigdor Liberman and ultra-dove Nitzan Horowitz, and in creating a partnership between opposites as distant as Islamist preacher Mansour Abbas and former West Bank settlers’ council leader Naftali Bennett.
The generosity was in Lapid’s volunteering to delay his own premiership by more than two years, despite bringing to this coalition more than twice the number of lawmakers than any of its other seven partners.
No, Lapid is not the messiah. His electorate is mostly affluent, his party is not run democratically, and his moves – like the fight he just picked with the Polish government – are debatable. Still, the humility he displayed this year and the sense of public responsibility and political appeasement he inspired were the antithesis of the previous leadership’s audacity, acrimony, swagger, and conceit.
That is how Yair Lapid shaped the Israeli year more than anyone else, and that is why he is our person of the year 5781. www.MiddleIsrael.net
The author’s bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.