Israel/Palestine

So calling for the murder of Gazan children is acceptable but explaining that this is insane is beyond the pale? Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz have to be more like Yair Golan, whom the government is keen to bar from the next election

Zehava Galon

With the storm dying down, one thing is clear: If Yair Golan had called for the killing of babies in Gaza, no one in the cabinet would have flinched. I know this because, the same day Golan made his remarks, former far-right MK Moshe Feiglin said that every baby in Gaza is an enemy. But that didn't interest the government at all.

"The enemy isn't Hamas, nor is it Hamas' military wing," our local Lao Tse said, explaining his doctrine as if he were the ancient Chinese philosopher. Lest there be any ambiguity, he added: "It's every child, every baby."

So calling for the murder of children is acceptable but explaining that this is insane is beyond the pale.

Those are the standards the cabinet is promoting. None of its members even bothered pretending they were shocked by Feiglin's comments, maybe because even they realize they live in glass houses. Instead, we got the usual self-righteous condemnations, with one change: According to the latest talking points, Golan, the head of the left-leaning Democrats party, shouldn't be allowed to run in the next election.

Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, for example, wrote that "a sane country wouldn't allow guys like Yair Golan, Bennett's natural partner, to set foot in its parliament." He was referring to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who plans to form a new party and run in the next election. And Likud's Tally Gotliv, who said this week that the hostages have been brainwashed by Hamas, deemed Golan's comment "aiding the enemy in wartime."

Pro-government Channel 14 television swiftly reported on a poll examining whether the public wanted Golan barred from the next election. The next day, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party announced that it planned to amend a Basic Law and bar Golan from running. And Thursday, Likud blamed him for the terror attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington.

All these zeros, thanks to whom a marginal terrorist organization managed to massacre many hundreds of Israelis, are now trying to ban a man who risked his life to save Israelis from that massacre.

And all this is happening in a country that, for nearly two years, has been silent in the face of clear calls for genocide. Such statements violate Israeli law, but in today's Israel, there is no penalty for them.

Nor was it an accident that Feiglin chose Channel 14 for his assertion that every baby in Gaza is an enemy. This channel is a sympathetic platform for such messages. Zulat and two other civil society organizations – the Democratic Bloc and the Movement for Fair Regulation – have filed a petition to the High Court via attorneys Michael Sfard and Einat Gayer demanding that criminal investigations be opened into such statements.

Here are a few other examples from Channel 14. "Now there really needs to be total destruction. We shouldn't fear words like, say, 'humanitarian disaster.'" (Itamar Fleischmann, November 26, 2023)

"We need to bomb indiscriminately. We make distinctions, and that isn't good. … The air force could work a little harder and not make distinctions between involved and uninvolved people." (Jacob Bardugo, November 2, 2023)

"There's a commandment to destroy Amalek … and Gaza is Amalek, and we need to destroy the Amalekites." (Shimon Riklin, February 11, 2024)

"Every day we kill 100 terrorists? … There are 2.5 million terrorists there." (Eliyahu Yosian, February 25, 2024)

There are countless other examples. The only insanity greater than the fact that murderous scumbags like this aren't in prison is the performance of the opposition, which is crawling on its belly to meet the scumbags' deranged standards.

Why did opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, and even our honorable president, Isaac Herzog, rush to condemn Golan of all people? Where did they disappear to when far more deranged things were said here? This is what shocks them?

What will happen when the government tries to prevent Golan from running for the Knesset? In the best case, they'll mutter that he's an extremist and belongs in Syria, but, well, we're a democracy. In the worst case, they'll once again vote according to the moral standards set by Netanyahu and his ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

It's time for opposition lawmakers to come to their senses and stop acting as Netanyahu's willing servants. We've reached the 11th hour. If they don't dig deep inside themselves and find their consciences, they may not get the chance again.

Source : Haaretz
Link : https://archive.md/BdSRu