Yair Lapid
Israeli journalist and founder of the Yesh Atid party, Prime Minister of Israel in 2022.
Biography
Yair Lapid was born in Tel Aviv in 1963, the son of the journalist and politician Tommy Lapid and the novelist Shulamit Lapid. He left high school without matriculating and served in the army as a correspondent for the military weekly Bamahane.
He built a long media career: editor of a local Tel Aviv paper at 25, a weekly columnist for Maariv and then Yedioth Ahronoth, host of television talk shows and, from 2008, anchor of Channel 2's Friday night news magazine. He also wrote novels, children's books, a television drama and song lyrics.
Lapid left journalism in 2012 to found the centrist Yesh Atid party, which won 19 seats in its first election in 2013. He served as finance minister under Benjamin Netanyahu until he was dismissed in December 2014, and led the opposition from 2020.
In 2021 he assembled the coalition that replaced Netanyahu, serving as foreign minister and alternate prime minister under Naftali Bennett. When that government collapsed he was prime minister from July to December 2022, the shortest non-interim term in Israel's history, and after the November 2022 election he again became leader of the opposition.
Offices held
Naftali Bennett Succeeded by
Benjamin Netanyahu
Affiliations
Party membership
- from Apr 30, 2012 Yesh Atid founder; registered 30 April 2012
- Jan 1, 2019 – Jan 1, 2020 Blue and White (political alliance) Yesh Atid ran within the alliance 2019-2020
Employment
- Maariv reporter after army service, later weekly columnist from 1991
- Yedioth Ahronoth weekly columnist after Maariv; earlier edited the group's local paper Yedioth Tel Aviv from 1988
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