Former Deputy IDF chief Yair Golan, who is running for the Meretz party leadership, appeared on TV a few days ago and announced, with a total lack of sensitivity, (as well as with total detachment from reality and the majority of Israel's public, which has already repented for the great mistake) that since the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the expulsion from Gush Katif it entailed Israel has been better off.
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"Do you want your children to patrol Jabaliya and Shujayyia?" he asked the interviewer rhetorically and provocatively. "I don't believe so. We have no reason to be there."
Yair Golan is one of the people least worthy of holding public office in Israel. He looks like someone with a clear belief system, but the perverse depths that appear from the jumble of words he spits out cause anyone who looks at him to see him as a representative of embarrassment.
What's amazing is that Yair Golan is a major general in the IDF. The fact that a person like this, with a divisive and hateful, poisonous and inciting world view commanded soldiers and was part of our military's leadership, puts us all in an extremely uncomfortable position. Are their more Yair Golans coming up through the IDF ranks to destroy us all from inside?
The claim "we have no reason to be there" belongs to the 1990s, as if Israel and its army were playing a game to amuse themselves while they were in a specific territory. No, that wasn't the Gaza Strip. It was a difficult place, full of Arabs, some of whom really want us to die and are trying to implement that desire. We weren't there because it was fun, but because – among other reasons – we wanted to prevent the situation in which we find ourselves now, with Hamas shooting on Tel Aviv because we have no strategic depth or quality intelligence. Even if Golan's ideology opposes settlement in the Gaza Strip, as an IDF general he is supposed to understand that. He doesn't. Or he's lying.
Later in the interview, Golan attacked soldiers who shot and killed terrorists during the stabbing intifada, calling those events "undramatic" and bemoaning the "process of radicalization and lack of ability to see the enemy as human beings." The fact that a person like this was commanding soldiers, "After me!" in battle makes one wonder.
Golan continued to drop more pearls, calling the IDF "an army of occupation." Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked responded, saying, "For the sake of the campaign for the Meretz leadership, you allow yourself to slander the IDF and bring it into your game as a political too. A people does not occupy their own country, and the IDF is the most moral army in the world."
And Golan answered, "Ayelet, I won't explain to you how to be a fascist, and you don't explain the IDF to me." There is a fair Left, a worthy Left, an ideological Left. Yair Golan doesn't meet any of those criteria.
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