It's still unclear if it will happen, but Lapid's move raises some important issues.
Lapid seems willing to sit with UTJ, an ultra-Orthodox party primarily composed of Ashkenazi Jews. Would he be willing to do the same if we were talking about Shas, which has its main support base in the Sephardi community? Probably not.
"No one is as corrupt as Shas," a colleague who voted for Shinui told me when I posed this question to him. While this may be true, Lapid's new found willingness to sit with "white" Jews, but not the "dark" ones lends credence to the charges that this is a man with some racist tendencies.
I do recall one occasion a year or so ago when Lapid made some disparaging remarks about Mizrahi music. If I remember correctly, he said something about hearing it and thinking he was in Ramallah, or some other West Bank city.
Lapid is a Holocaust survivor and certainly a proud Jew, but there's something almost anti-Semitic (Yes, I dared to say it) about his message. I'm not anti-Shinui. I might have voted for the party myself if it had a more leftist peace platform. But I get the feeling that there's some kind of hatred of religious Judaism and not just corruption, among some Shinui voters, not unlike the immigrants who disavowed their religious backgrounds in Europe to come to Israel with a new secular socialist brand of Judaism, not like the weak religious Judaism they felt fueled anti-Semitism and contributed to the Holocaust.
