Yeshar Koach, Yair Lapid

I’m a skeptical person. So I was apprehensive when Yesh Atid won 19 mandates in the Israeli parliament this January. The mood was too euphoric. Yair Lapid was too slick. The promises were too expansive. When my friend and fellow Crimson columnist Joshua B. Lipson ’14 wrote a piece in the Harvard Political Review praising the night’s victors I thought he had drunk some Kool-Aid. Or Arak. I was wrong. Two months into the new government, the new political party is revivifying the Zionist enterprise.

This isn’t Theodor Herzl’s Zionism. The father of Jewish nationalism thought Jewishness should serve as an ethnic base for an atheistic polity. Though Lapid is an avowed secularist, he has not demanded the abolition of the rabbinate, a state body, now controlled by the ultra-Orthodox, which regulates Jewish marriages, conversions, and burials and oversees kosher certifications. Yesh Atid’s Knesset membership is drawn from a wide range of Jewish traditions. Dov Lipman is an ultra-Orthodox rabbi from the United States who made his name fighting religious extremism in Beit Shemesh. Ruth Calderon is the founder of a progressive, egalitarian beit midrash. Shai Piron is a religious Zionist and headmaster of a yeshiva.

Yesh Atid supports the central planks of the secular agenda. Lapid has endorsed civil marriage, military service for the Haredi, and the right of non-Orthodox Jews to pray as they choose at holy sites. With his new government portfolio as finance minister, he has reduced funding for Haredi schools, places where zealotry is encouraged and math is treated like goyishe nakhes. He has also proven himself an adroit foe of Israel’s kibitzing theocrats, forcefully rebuking Knesset members from religious parties who chided him for using social media on the Sabbath.

What distinguishes Yesh Atid from previous secular parties, however—including the one Lapid’s father headed up—is that it is unafraid to speak in the language of Jewish tradition and refuses to concede Judaism as the demesne of Haredim.

Citing Torah and Talmud, national epic and personal narrative, Calderon gave an inaugural speech to the Knesset that called for “the creation of a new Hebrew culture in Israel,” reconciling secular and religious, past and future. Shortly after, she attended a conference of religious Zionists and clarified just exactly what that message meant. Calderon assailed rabbinical injunctions prohibiting property sales or rentals to Arabs as a form of racism. She denounced homophobia and transphobia as “bigotry, injustice, and a profanation of God’s name.” Briefly interrupted by a pisher’s heckling, she corrected his Hebrew.  “All people,” Calderon affirmed, “non-religious and religious, women and men, homosexuals and heterosexuals, Jews and non-Jews, all were created in the image of God.”

That universalist appeal is usually associated with liberal theology, but it also has deep roots in general Jewish religious thought. Consciously or not, Calderon channeled Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, the first chief rabbi of Israel and a prominent advocate of a halakhic state. Claimed as an idol by rabid Arab-haters, he actually condemned discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex.

Whether One Nation Jewishness is an answer to the Palestine question remains to be seen. Yesh Atid’s record is mixed thus far. During the campaign, Lapid committed to good-faith negotiations with Palestinians, and backed a limited settlement freeze. His party recently scotched a bill that would have required a settlement be approved in a nation-wide referendum. Yet he has pledged to keep all of Jerusalem in Jewish hands, a considerable stumbling block for Palestinians who want the eastern half of the city as their capital.

While Yesh Atid desires a less corrupt, less divided, and more prosperous Israel, this is, after all, a vision of Israel. Many party voters are cozily ensconced in the Tel Aviv bubble. They don’t read the papers, and, if they do, they skip over news from the West Bank. This year, they went to the polls because the price of cottage cheese was prohibitive and the rent was too damn high. The denizens of Tel Aviv and Ramallah inhabit different species of time: one good, another bordering on inhuman.

After a visit to the West Bank, Adi Kol, a Yesh Atid MK from Tel Aviv, recounted how jarring the experience was, writing on Facebook about the humiliation she faced at checkpoints and the abject poverty she saw along the road. “I am afraid, afraid that we will continue to live this way, afraid of the fear,” Kol confessed.

I am afraid, too. But I am less afraid than I was last year. There is a future.

Daniel J. Solomon ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Matthews Hall. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. Follow him on Twitter @danieljsolomon.