Lihi Lapid gets emotional as she speaks about the Negev Summit where her husband, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, had hosted four Arab foreign ministers and the US secretary of state earlier that day in late March.
“I’m used to seeing the US and Israel (on one side) and then the Arab countries (on the other), but to see them like this was like ‘Wow!’” Lapid said over dinner with a group of female journalists based in Israel. “The energy was an energy of friendship and that’s because of Yair. That’s who he is. He’s very warm.”
So is 54-year-old Lihi Lapid: within a half-hour of meeting her, I felt like I had known her forever. She is open and down to earth, especially about her struggles with raising a daughter, Yael, who is severely autistic and does not speak.
Lihi met Yair, who is slated to become prime minister in August 2023, just weeks before she finished her army service as a photographer. She was not yet 20 years old.
“I was a young woman with very short hair and a motorbike,” she says. “I was very, very cool.”
Yair came to do reserve duty and they quickly fell in love. According to her semi-autobiographical novel Woman of Valor, she proposed to him and he happily accepted!
She began her career as a news photographer for Ha’aretz and Ma’ariv, and one day her editor asked if she would go to Rwanda and shoot the delivery of a field hospital there, during the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in the 1990s. Lapid says it was a traumatic experience for all of the journalists.
When she returned she went to her gynecologist. She knew she was pregnant, but had already suffered two miscarriages and was sure this pregnancy would end the same way.
But this time her doctor told her that if she went on bed rest, she would be able to carry to term. But it meant giving up the motorcycle and taking a leave from her job. It was the first time, she says, that she realized there might be a conflict between having a career and being a mother. She went on bed rest for six months and gained 50 pounds.
“A few months after my son was born, I wanted to start working again,” she said. “But nobody was looking for a photographer who had to breastfeed every four hours and there was no place for a baby on the motorbike.”
In her book she is even more honest describing her difficult transition to motherhood this way: “Before I gave birth, I was told that with the birth of the baby my maternal instincts would awaken and they’d guide me, so that I’d know what to do, so that I’d understand him immediately and know what he needed. But he was born, and I did not discover a sixth sense in me... I was just exhausted, spent, confused and frightened like I’d never been in my life.”
After she gave up her career in news photography, a new option opened when Israel’s largest-circulation daily, Yediot Aharonot, offered her a “women’s column” dealing with recipes and other women’s issues.
“Me?” Lapid recalls asking herself. “I burn the salad. Me doing a women’s column?”
But if the largest paper in the country wants to give you a weekly page in the Friday paper, you don’t say no. She developed the column into a sounding board on all kinds of women’s issues, from motherhood to career to sexuality, and received hundreds of letters from women around the country every month.
She also found herself pregnant again, this time with a daughter. She says that it soon became clear that something was wrong. She described the night before they took the toddler to a hearing test.
“I was praying that she was deaf,” Lapid said, her voice breaking. “Because if she wasn’t deaf then it was something much worse.”
Yaeli, who is today in her 20s, is severely autistic and does not speak. She lives in a sheltered housing community, and Lihi Lapid has become a staunch advocate of integrating adults with disabilities into the community.
She is president of Shekel, an organization that advocates for the inclusion for adults with disabilities, and is advancing a new program for sheltered housing on kibbutzim around Israel.
Lapid says there has been a revolution in Israel about how people with disabilities are integrated into the community. When she was young, people with disabilities were rarely seen in public. Today there is much more understanding and acceptance of disabilities. But raising a child with disabilities is exhausting, as Lapid describes in her book when she attended a birthday party with both of her young children.
“I cursed myself the minute I walked into the room,” she writes. “I tried to ignore the stares the other mothers gave my daughter, the misunderstandings, the whispers – and the brave ones, those who asked interested questions, who forced me to explain, smile, play it down.”
Yaeli starts to eat the clay being used for an art project, and a well-meaning guest tries to get her to spit it out.
“‘Leave her alone!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t touch her!’” An uncomfortable silence descended. I didn’t tell them what other strange things she eats. I apologized to my friend and asked her to let me off the hook in the future. And from then on, I avoided going to these events.”
Lapid is an active campaigner on behalf of her husband and says she loves to campaign, but is careful to avoid politics. When she speaks about the current Israeli government – headed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, even though Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party won 17 seats to Bennett’s six – she praises it for “thinking out of the box.”
According to the coalition agreement, Bennett and Lapid are supposed to switch jobs in August 2023. “I’m not thinking about that now,” Lihi insists, only that she hopes this government continues.
Men and women approach the world differently and progress in their careers differently. Men climb the career ladder steadily, she says.
“But women are like kangaroos,” Lihi continues. “We make a big jump, rest for a while, and then make another big jump.”
She then gives a piece of advice for women torn between having children and pursuing a career.
“We can also do new things when we are 50,” she says, advice that Lapid herself has taken. ■