How politics is redefining 'left' and 'right' in Israel
Israel's political right and left were once defined by their approach to the Palestinian issue, but now the distinction is being applied to almost every area of debate.
The brouhaha over the speech by Israel Defense Forces Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan — which continues to reverberate even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on May 10 that it is "behind us" — proves that something has gone deeply wrong with the traditional division between Israel's political right and left.
Golan picked a problematic day on which to make his comments, May 4, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and his hard-hitting comparison between 1930s European Nazism and current trends in Israeli society stung. The remarks themselves should have been a matter of course in the kind of democratic society that Israel aspires to be.
Golan sought to warn against such phenomena as the July 2015 arson attack against a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma and against crimes of hatred and racism, stating, "Nothing is easier and simpler than bestial behavior, moral corruption and self-righteousness. On Holocaust Remembrance Day we would do well to discuss our capacity to uproot from within us the budding indications of intolerance, of violence and of self-destruction that pave the road to moral decline." Does the Israeli right not share these sentiments as an expression of a democratic philosophy?
The question that should have arisen — why not a single right-wing politician, except for Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, defended Golan's comments or at least his right to make them — did not. Golan was immediately labeled a leftist, reflecting the blurring of the traditional dichotomy between right and left in Israel, which since 1967 had always focused on the issue of the occupied territories.
