“Finance Minister Yair Lapid is turning out to be a shocking right-wing conservative,” says Knesset member Omer Bar-Lev of the Labor Party, analyzing the finance minister’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as expressed in an interview he granted The New York Times. The interview, in which Lapid addressed diplomatic issues, was published this week [May 19] and quoted extensively by the Israeli media.

Bar-Lev is a reserve colonel, a former commander of the IDF Sayertet Matkal elite unit and the son of the IDF’s eighth chief of staff, Haim Bar-Lev. He thinks that behind Lapid the politician, who won significant support from the center-left, hides a “[Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] ‘Bibi clone,’ who is now showing his true face.”

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Bar-Lev terms Lapid a “diplomacy refusenik.” He addresses excerpts from the interview in which Lapid said, among other things:

“East Jerusalem must remain in Israeli control because we didn’t come here for nothing. Jerusalem is not a place, it’s an idea.” Lapid was also quoted as saying he “would not stop the so-called ‘natural expansion’ of settlements in the West Bank, nor [would he] curtail the financial incentives offered Israelis to move there.”