Yair Lapid
Yair LapidHezki Baruch

Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid responded during a press conference on Saturday night to Friday's anti-Israel UN resolution.

During the press conference, Lapid spoke out against the UN's resolutions and called on the government to appoint a full-time Foreign Minister and bring the ball back into Israel's court.

Currently, Israel's Foreign Ministry is in the hands of Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu serves as Foreign Minister as well.

"The decision made by the UN Security Council on Friday is dangerous and unfair, and Israel will not accept it. The UN no longer tries to hide its anti-Israel bias. Outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon even admitted last week to this bias. Yesterday's decision was a hypocritical act. The UN Security Council has kept silent while 400,000 Syrians were brutally murdered, and it will not control sovereign Israel. When terror organizations such as Hamas praise terror attacks on civilians, the UN Security Council stays silent. It's obvious whose interests the Council serves," Lapid said.

Lapid also explained the diplomatic efforts which had attempted to prevent the UN from voting on the resolution.

"I worked with the government in an attempt to stop this vote. I spoke with the White House, with foreign media, with friends around the world. I will continue these diplomatic efforts, because I love the State of Israel and will always help to defend her," Lapid continued. "I harshly condemn the way the left has celebrated on the media this injury to Israel. Patriots do not act this way. But this does not mean nothing serious happened. Something very serious did happen."

"During the past two years, Prime Minister Netanyahu said over and over that the Obama government hates him, but the world continued to believe in Obama. What happened yesterday completely destroyed that theory. The drama was not only with the US. It turned out no country in the world - none at all - agrees with Israel. We had no supporters in that vote," he emphasized. "We have been completely left out of everything important. We have failed to properly present ourselves to the international community.

"We were surprised. We were caught unprepared. We must never be caught unprepared. Just like the IDF cannot be unprepared for war, the government cannot be unprepared for political surprises from the international community. Those countries which Netanyahu promised us were allies - Russia, England, Egypt - were the very countries who pushed for this vote.

"What do we need to do now? We need to have a plan. First of all, we need a full-time Foreign Minister. Don't ask me if I want the job, because the answer is no, but the government has enough people who can do it properly. Not everything is politics. We need a full-time Foreign Minister, and we need people who can properly run our PR, especially the international side of it. We also need someone to head the National Security Council - it hasn't had a chairman since December 2015. We need a National Security Council chairman who will oversee the work and make sure everything runs smoothly. We need to bring the ball back into Israel's court," Lapid concluded.