The “defining political struggle” of our time, said Zivan, was “not any more a struggle between an old left and an old right but a struggle between the political centre and political extremes”.
In the imposing setting of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall, he and Sir Ed shared ideas on liberal values, contemporary challenges and their political motivations.
“I was always attracted to moderate, pragmatic, effective politics,” said Zivan, who recalled the assassination of Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 as a seminal moment. “I remember despite being very young at the time being horrified that politics could lead to violence.”
Extremism always leads to violence unless it is stopped by moderate forces
He had been born in Ma’alot, Northern Israel before coming to Leicester with his family when he was young and then returning to Israel after gaining a first-class degree in history from University College London.
Zivan reached the conclusion that extremism “inevitably, always leads to violence unless it is checked and stopped by moderate forces and so my motivation in everything I have done since then has been to try to strengthen the moderate forces, liberal forces, centrist forces in the fight against extremism.”
And while some tried to appease extremists by hoping they could get them to moderate their views over time, he said he saw no evidence that approach worked.
“We see parties trying to appease populist rivals rather than trying to stand up to them— parties on the left and parties on the right are guilty of doing that,” he said. “The political centre is the place where you can say ‘Actually I’m not going to give any quarter whatsoever’.”
As an example, he pointed to recent Israeli local elections where Yesh Latid had been the only party to have taken the decision not to sit with Otzmah Yehudit, the far-right Jewish Power Party.
But as an antidote to extremist ideas, he said in the book he had cited the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks “who talked about a positive politics, a politics of hope as opposed to a politics of fear. And I think that is something that centrists are uniquely placed to do…”
Sharing the centrist stage: Sir Ed Davey, Yair Zivan and Gavin Stollar (photo: Amy Greaves)[Missing Credit]
Extremists “always tried to make out there are simple answers,” Sir Ed said. “ It is the job of centrist, liberals, progressives, social democrats — however you want to call them— to actually tell people what they know, that actually life is a bit more complicated.
“There aren’t simple answers and if you blame the foreigner or the stranger, you are not taking responsibility for you, your family, your community, your country. Sometimes that can be difficult to get over.”
The social progress achieved by liberals and progressives across the world was “under serious attack”, he argued, and they needed now to move out of their comfort zone to meet the threat of the times.
He spoke of the thinking behind the LibDems’ campaign strategy which used humour — encapsulated in TV images of him bunjee-jumping and paddle-boarding — but also an appeal to emotion, when he shared his personal experiences of caring both for his sick mother as a boy and now for his seriously disabled son. He had felt that Liberals had previously been “a bit too cerebral” and prone to adopt an “eat your vegetables” approach when trying to get their message across.
When he was asked if he thought Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer would govern from the centre ground or pander to the Labour left, he responded: “I generally think the jury is out…I don’t think we actually know.
“There are one or two examples where he clearly wants to give red meat to the left. Whether that is to keep them quiet, and what role is Angela Rayner going to play — is she the John Prescott of Keir Starmer, how will that operate? —we just don’t know, to be honest.”
After the event, Gavin Stollar, chair of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, who earlier this week received his OBE from King Charles at Windsor, told the JC he had been encouraged by the number of new MPs from the party had contacted the group.
