Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid is in trouble.
And no, this has nothing to do with the snide, insulting comment he made Monday in an interview about National Missions Minister Orit Strock: “I look at Orit Strock, and just for that, I deserve a raise.”
Lapid—justifiably—was taken to the woodshed by coalition MKs for that remark. Rather than apologizing, however, he doubled down like most politicians in similar situations.
“Everyone understands that I was talking about her conduct, not her appearance. It’s a shame I didn’t see such outrage when Orit Strock said that the hostages should be abandoned and left to die. I’m waiting for Strock’s apology [about that].”
While that whole exchange was unseemly, that is not why Lapid is in trouble. His real problem is captured in a headline from the front page of Friday’s Maariv over a graph of the newspaper’s latest weekly poll: “Liberman maintains his strength, Lapid continues to dive.”
According to the poll, were elections to be held today, Lapid’s Yesh Atid party would drop to 12 seats— half its current standing in the Knesset. If elections were held today—and only the parties in the Knesset today would be the ones running—Yesh Atid would not be the second largest in parliament, but rather the fifth, after the Likud (23 seats), the National Unity Party and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu (16 each) and Yair Golan’s Democrats (14).
What this means is that a year and a half after the biggest and most tragic security failure in the country’s history, the leading party in the coalition has—according to the poll—lost 28% of its strength, while the party of Lapid—who is head of the opposition—lost 50%.
The voters want to punish Lapid—who wasn't in power on October 7—more than they want to punish Netanyahu, who was in power and bears responsibility.
And that’s the good news for Lapid in that poll.
The bad news for Lapid
The bad news is that if, as widely expected, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett forms a new party, then Lapid’s faction would drop even more - to nine seats.
And Maariv’s poll is no outlier. In the average of all polls compiled on the HaMadad website, Yesh Atid garners just 9.9 seats, as opposed to 27.3 for Likud and 14.8 for Yisrael Beytenu.
Rather than taking cheap shots at Strock, Lapid should ask himself where he went wrong. As head of the opposition, he has failed to bring down the government—the number one priority he set for himself immediately after the Netanyahu government was sworn into office at the end of 2022—and he has also failed to put forth any positive agenda.
The two failures are likely connected.
Tune into any Lapid interview or speech in Knesset, and the message is the same: Netanyahu is a disaster, the government is miserable, the messianists are at the gates, and the current coalition is a mortal threat to the country’s democracy and its future.
In other words, all negative. Netanyahu is to blame for everything—from the hostages languishing in Hamas’s tunnels to Israel’s declining global standing - and everything he does is terrible.
Now, obviously, Netanyahu bears much of the responsibility for much of the current situation, but the public already knows that. They don’t need to hear Lapid say it ad nauseam. At some point, they need to hear something constructive from him, not destructive - not just more outrage.
Since he lost the last election to Netanyahu in 2022, Lapid has run on an exclusively negative ticket—endlessly lamenting the situation without offering real or constructive solutions, aside from insisting the current government must go.
Lapid’s poll numbers, however, suggest that the strategy is not working.
This is why Lapid’s recent unveiling of a plan for an Egyptian trusteeship of Gaza is interesting. Not because the plan, which Lapid admits he never discussed with the Egyptians and which the Egyptians have rejected out of hand, has much of a chance, but because it suggests he may recognize the need to pivot. If he wants to compete politically, he needs to put forward ideas, not just repeat criticism of Netanyahu.
What’s puzzling is that he chose to unveil the plan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, not in Israel—perhaps a miscalculation since he needs to convince Israeli voters, not American think tank audiences, that he has a vision.
Lapid’s proposal outlines a solution to two interconnected challenges: Hamas’s ongoing control in Gaza and Egypt’s deep economic crisis. Under this plan, Egypt would assume responsibility for Gaza’s governance for 8 to 15 years, focusing on security, civilian management, and rebuilding efforts. In exchange, the international community and Gulf states would pay off Egypt’s external debt ($155 billion) and support Gaza’s rehabilitation.
A peacekeeping force led by Egypt, with Gulf and international partners, would oversee Gaza’s demilitarization and reconstruction while laying the groundwork for eventual self-governance.
Lapid said this would stabilize Gaza, removing it as a security threat to Israel while strengthening Egypt economically and politically and preserving it as a key regional ally.
On paper, it sounds good. But then again, so did US President Donald Trump’s idea of relocating Gazans. The real problem is implementation.
But in this context, that is beside the point.
The point is that Lapid has offered something constructive. True, he presented it at the wrong venue (in the US), but if he wants to regain political relevance and be seen as a leader, he’ll need to do more of this. The public already knows what he thinks about Netanyahu and his government. Bashing Netanyahu will only go so far. Lapid’s poll numbers are making that abundantly clear.