Getting to the Knesset caucus room of the Labor Party is not easy. Labor is now the smallest faction in the Knesset, and its office is in what looks like a storage hallway. It’s hard not to see this as a metaphor for how the mighty party—Israel’s founding and long-ruling political party for around a quarter-century—has fallen.
It’s here where I interviewed Yair Golan, head of a new party called The Democrats, a merger of Labor and its more dovish ally, Meretz. Indeed, the 2022 election was when the Labor Party barely made the threshold, which is 3.25 percent of the national vote, and Meretz missed it by a few thousand votes. There were failed efforts to merge the two parties for that election. Now it’s clearly a necessity.
Golan is a former IDF deputy chief of staff. A reserve major general, he was also commander of the Home Front Command (in charge of protecting civilians in emergency situations) and of the Northern Command (in charge of overseeing security in the northern part of the country). He was deputy minister of economy in the Bennett-Lapid 2021 government for Meretz and served as a member of the Knesset for Meretz from 2019 to 2022. He ran previously for Meretz party leader and lost, partly because the dovish party didn’t want to be led by a military figure. But times have changed. Now, even the left understands that it needs military bona fides in a country still deeply traumatized by October 7.
On the day that Hamas attacked inside Israel, Golan put on his uniform as soon as he heard what was happening and reported to the Home Front Command. He received calls from worried parents about their children hiding out from Hamas terrorists on the Nova Music Festival grounds. Consulting Google Maps, he headed in that direction and rescued three young men. “I was completely alone with a rifle,” he said. But he didn’t hesitate: “You don’t stay and do nothing. You don’t wait for commands … people can change the picture, do something positive in time of huge trauma.”
He reentered politics, he told me, “because I think that the main and the most important issue concerning the destiny of Israel is the following: annexation or separation? Where are we heading? It’s very important to define the problem. It’s not about two-state solution, three-state solution.… We could think about all kinds of solutions. We know that the human imagination has no limits. The real question is what do we want?”
Annexation, favored by many in the current ultra-right-wing Netanyahu government, would mean officially extending Israel’s borders throughout the entire occupied Palestinian population. In that scenario, there would be two options—to give full democracy to the entire population (something the right-wing government would never do) or to then have an apartheid state with two completely different sets of laws for Jews and Palestinians under the new borders. Separation, on the other hand, would mean Israel relinquishing its 58-year occupation of the Palestinian land taken in the 1967 war.
Annexation, Golan believes, “would bring with it the destruction, a complete destruction of Israel.… And the crazy idea that we will wake up to a shiny morning and there will be no Palestinians between the river to the sea …” He laughs as he lets the sentence trail off.
It’s not easy to be someone who supports a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in post–October 7 Israel. A corrupt, messianic, antidemocratic government baits the left at every turn. A government-endorsed TV news channel puts Fox News to shame. Started in the Netanyahu era under the guise of opening up television to new points of view, Channel 14 is a far-right religious channel that has only pro-government spokespeople on it. There are daily governmental efforts to shutter cultural and educational programming. Calls for revenge abound, as does the feeling, especially among the hostage families and their network of supporters, that the country is simply broken. It shouldn’t be discounted how the horrors of that day and the aftermath have shaken many from the withered peace camp to their core.
Meanwhile, the center parties—Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Benny Gantz’s National Union—are slowly losing support. Most polls for the last two years have shown a coalition government comprising anyone but a Netanyahu-led Likud with his far-right and ultra-Orthodox partners winning over the current regime. Such a coalition would be a mishmash of left, center, and non-Likud right parties. In such an amalgam, the Democrats will not be the largest party, but they will surely provide the ideological spine.
Even in an Israel torn apart by massive ideological divides and a 16-year rule by a demagogue, Golan’s new party has either held steady at least nine mandates (the Israeli term for seats) or risen recently to a high of 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.
Golan thinks he knows why: “What we have here in Israel, it’s not about right and left. It’s between a Zionist liberal and democratic approach versus a messianic approach, a corrupted right. The messianic right is so deeply unattached to reality, exactly like those very irresponsible persons that initiated the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132.” (Throughout our conversation, Golan not only sprinkles in historic examples from previous centuries but quotes biblical tractates to make his point about the inherently liberal nature of Judaism.)
“The only way to cope with it,” he says, “is by bringing a very solid ideological concept.” He has no patience for the center parties, not mentioning names—but clearly meaning those led by Lapid (currently the official opposition leader) and Gantz, who was once seen as a strong challenger to Netanyahu but whose star fades daily. “The terrible notion of the extreme center in Israel is: We have no intention to say anything meaningful. Wake in the morning … and we follow the wind. We don’t need wind finders. We need a compass.”
He continues: “We need to build a new political camp.” In this goal, he includes the 21 percent of Israeli citizens (within the internationally recognized demarcation borderlines for Israel) who are Arab: “The Arabs live with us. So, by law and by God, we are commanded to provide them equality.”
He minces no words about Netanyahu. He calls him a “criminal” who is “a danger to his own people” and says: “Basically, Netanyahu is the same person as Chávez in Venezuela, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary. It’s a kind of disease that encompasses the world, this populist wave.”
In contrast, he says, “I want to bring something good to the world, I want to do the right thing here. We have a huge struggle between those who think that Israel should be a liberal democratic state and those who think that Israel should be a kind of authoritarian theocratic state. The government is autocratic.… The fact that so many Israelis still don’t understand it is outrageous … I know that I know how to lead. I have much experience in leading people in times of emergencies, in time of struggle.”
Meanwhile, the war in Gaza continues on a low burn “because Netanyahu … doesn’t want to free the hostages because he knows that by finishing the war he will need to face all his political problems. So, without saying it formally, he signed the following deal with the messianic parties—keep the dream of annexation alive, the dream of rebuilding … settlements inside the Gaza Strip.”
He embraces the efforts of the Arab states surrounding Israel, which Netanyahu dismisses. “We need to build inside the Gaza Strip an alternative to Hamas with the Palestinian Authority, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, with any other moderate Muslim country,” he says. “To fight effectively against Hamas, it’s not enough to kill the militants. By the doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare, it’s clear that on the one hand, you need to find the militants, and on the other hand, you need to capture the hearts and the minds of the general population.… We did nothing to build an alternative to Hamas. This is outrageous.”
Of Donald Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of Gazans, Golan says: “The American president has mentioned an idea. But there’s a huge gap between a general idea and a true plan. I would say even more than that, let’s assume that 100,000, 200,000, 500,000, half a million people will emigrate out of the Gaza Strip. So then we will need to cope with just 1.5 million people living on 365 square kilometers (141 square miles), one of the densest places on earth, an area with much infrastructure problems.”
The important thing now, he says, is to build an alternative to Hamas. “If you have this regional project, then you can expand the cooperation between these countries to cope with all forms of radical Islam in the region,” he says. “And we will face more radical Islam challenges from Iran and from Turkey.… And the fact that because of this extreme right-wing government, we are not able to do something positive for the sake of Israel, it’s outrageous.”
He emphasizes: “We need a new political language. You know the right used to call itself the national camp. They are not the national camp. We are the national camp. They destroy the nation. They are a threat to the nation.”
I ask him to define what being a Zionist means to him. It’s a toxic word among many progressives outside of Israel today. “If you ask me what is to be a Zionist? It is the modern movement of the Jewish people. We are the people who deal with Tikkun Olam,” he comments, a Hebrew phrase that is central especially to liberal Judaism, meaning “repair the world.” He continues: “You cannot conduct Tikkun Olam without being a democrat, liberal, and being a Jew at the same time. We want a better world. This is the notion on which I emphasize all my efforts, and I put in the center of my activity the single human being.”
For sure, opponents will continue to bait Golan and the party as out of touch. Still, it’s a party led by a former general who believes there should be a Palestinian state next to Israel. It’s happened before, of course, but this is a wretched time for liberal ideas. He has a clear road in mind, to fight the current government “in the courts, in the political arena, and in the streets, to call for new elections as soon as possible.” Golan is a long-distance runner.
