https://www.jns.org/opinion/ehud-barak-yair-golan-and-israels-new-left/
Only radical leftists in Israel and abroad believe that the IDF is ethically reckless, or that the Jewish state is not “very strict” when it comes to monitoring its own morality.
Maj. Gen. (ret) Yair Golan, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is a gift to the left that keeps on giving.
But don’t take my word for it. Just ask former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who proudly displayed Golan last week in a Tel Aviv press conference that he held to announce his formation of a new party to run in the Sept. 17 elections for the 22nd Knesset.
Barak’s recruitment of Golan to the yet-to-be-named party—whose campaign pledge is to “do whatever it takes” to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—was clear. Older-generation Israeli politicians, particularly failed peace-camp has-beens like Barak, continue to harbor the dated notion that having military men on their ticket is an electoral draw, if not a must.
The idea, from a left-wing perspective, is that a highly decorated IDF uniform serves as a shield against accusations of disloyalty or a lack of patriotism. It is a perfect cloak to enable selling the country down the tubes, as Barak himself nearly did at Camp David in 2000, by offering arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat the moon and the stars. Oh, and swathes of Israeli territory in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Arafat’s response—the launch of a suicide-bombing war against innocent Israelis going about their business on buses, in restaurants and at shopping malls—led to Barak’s ouster in 2001. Later, he would insist that his overly generous offer to Arafat had been calculated to call the PLO chief’s bluff. But nobody bought it. Or cared. The daily sounds of sirens wailing through the streets on the way to the latest blown-up bodies will do that.
At the time, Barak was the head of the Labor Party, which presented itself as the sane center-left. You know, the successors of the founding fathers of the state. The rightful heirs to the throne, which had been “stolen” from them in 1977 by Menachem Begin and the increasingly riff-raff, right-leaning public.