Yair Golan, a veteran with 40 years of military service, was a major general in the Israeli reserves on Oct. 7, 2023. That morning, he jumped into his car, picked up an automatic weapon at an army base, fought against the massacre and rescued survivors. He is perhaps the most famous Israeli hero of that day. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused him of “echoing the vilest anti-Semitic blood libels against IDF soldiers and the State of Israel.”
What Golan had done was to accurately accuse Netanyahu and his gang of war crimes: “These things are simply appalling. It cannot be that we, the Jewish people—who have suffered persecution, pogroms, and genocide throughout our history, and who have served as a moral compass for Jewish and human values—are now taking actions that are simply unconscionable…. Israel is on the path to becoming a pariah state among the nations—like the South Africa of old—if it does not return to behaving like a sane country.... A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies for a hobby, and does not set goals involving the expulsion of populations.” The blame is on Netanyahu’s gang, “people who have nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism—Kahanist types, lacking wisdom, morality, and the ability to manage a state during an emergency. This is dangerous to our very existence.”
The reverberations are still being felt. Yesterday his presentation at the annual Sderot conference for education and society in Beersheba was assaulted with whistles, sirens and yelling by hecklers, accusing him of treason. Golan didn’t back down: “Shame on you. You are tearing apart the state, at a conference whose purpose [is to discuss] how to rebuild what you haven’t yet taken apart.... It’s because of people like you that Rabin was murdered. If you had the courage, you would listen, but you are afraid, distrustful, and that causes you hate that leads to violence. You won’t make me hate because I am a courageous person…. I dare to love you…. At my advanced age, I went to save people from the Nova party [on Oct 7]. I risked my life while you sat at home in safety.”
The Times of Israel reported: “Immediately after Golan spoke, Deputy Minister Almog Cohen of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party rushed onto the stage—though he reportedly had not been invited to speak—and offered praise to the hecklers. Ben-Gvir also spoke at the conference, where he backed the hecklers, telling the crowd, ‘They are right, Yair Golan really is a traitor. A person like that should not be an Israeli politician.’”
Golan responded, posting on X his indictment of Netanyahu: “I know that this is incitement from above. The same man who incited to murder Rabin continues to incite also today.” Opposition Leader MK Yair Lapid rose to the occasion, posting: “Yair Golan is not a traitor and I completely condemn the calls against him.... Itamar Ben-Gvir, a criminal who was convicted of supporting terror and was the national security minister on October 7, is a danger to the security and welfare of the country.” And the powerful Benny Gantz, leader of the opposition National Unity party, who last week had criticized Golan for being too outspoken, now posted a defense of Golan—that during his military career, he “endangered his life for the state and dedicated his life to its security.... [T]he calls of ‘traitor’ should be completely condemned, and the first to condemn them should be the prime minister.”
Has the ending of decades of silence and equivocation on the Rabin assassination pricked the moral conscience of Israelis?
