One of the Likud Party's more provocative campaign ads from the 2015 elections features armed Islamic State militants driving a small pickup truck in Israel. The militants stop to ask a kind Israeli driver how to get to Jerusalem. He answers, "Go left." The message was clear. The left will be weak against terrorism, letting IS into the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally led the campaign, approving every ad and statement and maximizing use of its theme: the danger posed by the left. Netanyahu wasn't the only politician to make use of that motif, but he was undoubtedly the most sophisticated.

A new study — "Stop Dismantling, Start Putting Together," presented April 3 by the leaders of Pnima (Inside, in Hebrew) to mark the launch of their new movement — suggests that the right's campaign to delegitimize the left has been effective. Pnima's leaders include former Israel Defense Forces Chiefs of Staff Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi and former Education Minister Shai Piron. They go to great lengths to talk about the risks posed by the growing rifts in Israeli society, chief among them the one between right and left, but one astonishing statistic cuts through their high-minded language: 22.5% of Jews in Israel believe that the left is dangerous. The very idea has far-reaching implications.

It is hard not to assume that this can be attributed, at least in part, to the right's campaign to delegitimize the left. Indeed, in 2017, being identified with the left is considered problematic image-wise to the point that Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid, a large part of whose followers hold moderate, left-leaning positions, carefully distances himself from any link to the left. The question is whether the left itself and its leadership are in some way responsible for their problematic image and the distancing of large segments of the population from the camp, which once had a grip on power. The day Pnima was founded — with the purpose of healing rifts and moderating today's spiteful dialogue — should be an opportunity for the left to boldly look inward and determine whether it also bears part of the blame.

Despite conventional wisdom, the division between right and left is not based solely on diplomatic issues or whether to support or oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. Quite a few polls conducted over the last few years indicate that even among moderate right voters, there is a majority that supports the creation of a Palestinian state as part of an agreement that leads to peace. Furthermore, even their leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, came out publicly in support of a Palestinian state in his 2009 Bar Ilan speech, and later repeated the same message. Even if Netanyahu is not doing anything to advance this objective, that he made such a statement proves that a Palestinian state is something that Likud voters could live with, if it leads to peace with the Palestinians. That is why the leaders of the left must search elsewhere for answers to why its image has suffered so much.