Yair Golan’s accusations against Netanyahu: A reflection of Israel’s deep divides - opinion

Edmund Burke thought of the ears of his fellow Englishmen as being “distinguishing.” In an 1811 volume of his collected maxims published by Dr. French Laurence, his literary editor, we read on page 39: “They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy.”

At the Sderot Conference convened in Beersheba on May 27, Yair Golan was the object of severe berating by a crowd that took advantage of his outdoor appearance to express their negative opinion of his most recent outspokenness they had heard.

In an interview broadcast over KAN Reshet Bet radio on May 20, Golan spoke with his well-known bluntness and brashness. He was upset that Israel is viewed as becoming a pariah nation, today’s South Africa of yesteryear. Israel needs to return to a proper level of sanity, he declared, as the war basically ended in the spring of last year, strategic-wise, and is now but a campaign waged for its political value.

He told his interviewer that Israel cannot crush Hamas and gain the release of the hostages at the same time. He prefers the hostages, due to civic mutual responsibility, over the government’s war aims. Hamas can be dealt with in three, five or even 10 years’ time, although he did not explain the morality of allowing other Israeli civilians to perhaps suffer injury, death, and perhaps kidnapping during that time.

He then said, “A sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby, and doesn’t set for itself the goals of expelling a population.” He then added, “This government is full of people who have nothing in common with Judaism. Vengeful types, lacking intelligence....” Did he not recall the criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu when he whispered into Kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri’s ear that the Left “has forgotten what it is to be Jewish”?

After tolerating several minutes of the shouting directed at him at the Beersheba conference a week later, including being called a “traitor,” he burst out in a hoarse stridency, shouting at the crowd that Netanyahu deserved that epithet.

He laid into his opponents, shouting, “It is he [Netanyahu], he who followed a coffin, who for three decades is instructing you to hate, to hate, to hate. That’s all you know. You are afraid. You’re dying of fear.”

Again, he enlisted his view of history: “Israel, from the beginning of Zionism, from [all the wars of] 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, was built by brave people, but you are cowards. The truth strikes fear into you, more than Hamas, more than Iran.”

Referring to his volunteering on the day Hamas invaded Israel, he then stated, “Where were you, you zeros, on Oct. 7? I was risking my life.”

WHAT THE mainstream media did not pass on to the public was Golan’s further criticism of Netanyahu. Accusing him of maintaining contacts with Qatar during the war, he said, “He is a traitor to the State of Israel... he is destroying the state.”

As I have noted on more than one occasion in these pages, left-of-center politicians, and the media in their footsteps, sought to prohibit the use of the terms “traitor” and “treachery” in public discourse. To mention them was to be charged with incitement. Right-wing public figures would be reviled if they employed those words.

Yair Golan felt no compunction in accusing Netanyahu of being a 'traitor'

Golan was not the only one to refer to Netanyahu as a traitor during the opposition’s yearslong campaign to bring him down. On April 4 this year, the memorial to his brother, Yoni, who fell in Operation Entebbe, was painted with the words, “Bibi is a traitor.” Attorney Itai Leshem, a central anti-Bibi protest figure, is being sued by Netanyahu for, among other things, calling him a “traitor.”

On March 19 this year, Moshe Radman, a central Kaplan Force leader, stood outside Netanyahu’s apartment on Aza Road in Jerusalem and shouted, “Netanyahu is acting treasonously to Israel’s future.... We withstood Haman, Pharaoh, the British Mandate and Hitler, we’ll overcome this government.”

Netanyahu is not only accused of treason but of heartless concern for Israel’s citizens. Nehemia Shtrasler, writing in Haaretz on April 29, asked: “Does Netanyahu see the 1,840 victims of the October 7 war when he looks in the mirror?” Amos Schocken, Haaretz’s owner and publisher, wrote on May 6 that “Netanyahu wants endless terror.” Einav Zangauker, mother of hostage Eitan, has accused Netanyahu of wanting her son dead.

Eli Gelman, a former chairman of Tel Aviv University’s executive council, wrote a year ago that it was a “pity” Netanyahu was not on board the helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, as such an accident could “solve many problems for us and the world.”

It appears their words merit immunity. Are those words having an effect?

On May 28, even though some of the Left warned Likud-led forces would storm the Knesset, a dozen left-wing activists attempted a sit-in inside the Knesset. Later that evening, 62 protesters invaded the Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv. Indeed, we are in dangerous times.

As one of Burke’s more familiar epigrams has it, though, “Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for, never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.” For Israel, the cost could be staggering.

The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.