Operation Protective Edge caught the chairman of the Yesh Atid party, Yair Lapid, in a positive momentum. After barely treading water in the polls, which showed public dissatisfaction with his performance as finance minister, he has managed to halt the negative trend and create for himself a positive perspective with his proposed Zero VAT Law on the purchase of a first apartment.

Having presented this bill, Lapid was no longer considered a politician trapped in a race for survival, dragged along by events and steadily losing the enormous credit he had earned in the last elections. Instead, he was was transformed into an instigator of a revolutionary socioeconomic move. He managed to relay once again a sense of freshness and innovation, while proving that his heart was in the right place when he confronted the Finance Ministry bureaucrats, who opposed the plan. He showed resolve when he promised that the law would go into effect by early September. It was because of the finance minister’s persistence that the high demand for apartments began to drop considerably.

Then, just when it seemed as if Lapid was leaving all his troubles behind him, the conflict in Gaza erupted, and security and diplomatic issues suddenly dominated the national agenda. Although the finance minister is a member of the Security Cabinet which deals with these issues, the war was his baptism by fire in that very select forum. In other words, when compared with the other members of that forum, he was still at a clear disadvantage on security and diplomatic matters. As far as the public is concerned, he is not on par with the prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister or justice minister. He is even considered less adept in these issues than Minister of Economy and Trade Naftali Bennett, who may lack Cabinet experience just as Lapid, but who did serve as an officer in an elite unit. While Bennett and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman detached themselves from the government’s policies during the military operation and outflanked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the right, the chairman of Yesh Atid had no choice but to align himself with the prime minister and back him, a position which hardly won him any new support from either the right or the left.

As if that were not enough, his Zero VAT Law, which should have brought back some of the voters who had abandoned him, took at the same time a beating in the Finance Committee from the ultra-Orthodox parties and the Labor Party, which managed to block its approval for the time being. Celebrating a legislative success would have been a welcome change of pace for Lapid, but now that the Knesset has gone on hiatus, Lapid was forced to come up with excuses for the public instead.