Any fair assessment of Yair Golan must begin with what is unquestionably to his credit. He spent nearly four decades in uniform, held some of the IDF’s most senior commands and rose to the post of deputy chief of staff. On October 7, 2023, while Israel was still struggling to comprehend the scale of the disaster, he did not remain on the sidelines. Golan, then a civilian and reserve major general, went south and personally took part in rescuing survivors from the massacre zone.

Nor is there anything illegitimate about his politics. He is fully entitled to hold left-wing views, to oppose Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and to believe that some of its actions endanger Israeli democracy. A healthy democracy needs a vigorous left no less than it needs a right and a center.

The issue I want to examine is a different one.

Golan heads a party that has chosen the highly demanding name “The Democrats.” He does not merely seek to replace a government. He presents his political camp as engaged in a struggle to save Israeli democracy itself. That makes it entirely legitimate to ask whether the language and methods he employs are always consistent with the democratic values he claims to defend.

This is not a question of left versus right. It is a question of how one treats political opponents, public officials one distrusts, institutional gatekeepers one considers compromised, and media outlets one regards as harmful.

When Harsh Words Become a Pattern

Golan has a long record of inflammatory language.

In April 2022, for example, he described Amichai Chikli (my son, who is now serving as Minister of Diaspora Affairs) as “a man who came from the garbage heap.” Asked to explain himself, he said he meant that Chikli had been an unknown figure whom Naftali Bennett had brought into politics and who, in Golan’s view, repaid him with disloyalty. That context matters. It does not, however, make the phrase itself any more appropriate in the language of elected officials.

The same principle applies to the Homesh controversy. Golan used the term “subhuman” to describe people whom he accused of attacking Palestinians, desecrating graves and property, and committing other serious acts. After the ensuing uproar, he explicitly clarified that he was referring to those individuals and not to settlers as a whole. Fairness requires that this clarification be noted.

Yet even when speaking about alleged offenders, a political leader who uses language that effectively strips people of their humanity crosses, in my view, a dangerous line.

It is therefore reasonable to acknowledge that some quotations attributed to Golan have occasionally been taken out of context or generalized too broadly by his critics. But when this kind of language recurs over a period of years, it becomes harder to dismiss every........

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