Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid decided to begin his party’s weekly faction meeting Dec. 14 with a focused attack on Israel's Haaretz newspaper. The paper had responded to a request by Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, to remove the Israeli flag from the stage when he addressed a conference it organized in New York City on “Peace, democracy and social justice.”
Lapid adopted a very strident tone, calling the paper’s acquiescence to the request “the ultimate loss of any sense of national pride whatsoever by the radical left. Imagine the commotion if an Israeli spokesperson had asked for the Palestinian flag to be removed.”