Golan: If Israel maintains liberal values, ‘woke’ critics will have less ‘ammunition’

Yair Golan, chair of the left-wing The Democrats party, said Sunday that Israel should deprive its “woke” and progressive critics of “ammunition” by adhering to “liberal democratic values.”

With just 50 days to go until the national election on October 27, campaigning has kicked into high gear as parties prepare to submit their final electoral lists to the Central Elections Committee on Monday and Tuesday.

Speaking at an election event for English speakers, Golan was asked how he would work with US Democratic politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who are vocal opponents of Israel.

Golan, a former deputy IDF chief, responded that there “is no need to work with everyone.”

“It’s a wider question, where are we heading. If Israel will be perceived as an extreme nation… a kind of theocratical country — well, the minute we do that, we disconnect our ties with the West,” Golan said at the event hosted by the Tel Aviv International Salon.

As “the homeland of all the Jewish people,” Golan said, “in order to keep our destiny, in order to keep our mission… we need to be with the West, and we need to preserve and to enforce these liberal democratic values.”

He added that in the military he felt a close kinship with his US counterparts because “we truly felt at that time that we are together, we are the vanguard of the democratic world.”

“So yes, we can work with Democrats and Republicans,” Golan said. “I know there is the ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ and… all kinds of figures that are truly very negative from [an] Israeli perspective. We should not give them… more and more ammunition from day to day.”

Meanwhile, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir removed from social media a video he posted that showed him taunting Palestinian women detained at the Damon security prison last month.

The removal followed an appeal by the Committee Against Torture NGO to the Central Elections Committee, claiming the video constituted illegal use of state resources for election propaganda.

A spokesman for Ben Gvir did not immediately respond on Monday when asked whether the minister took down the video because of the NGO’s appeal.

In June, Ben Gvir removed a video showing him tormenting activists aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by the IDF after he was ordered to do so by the Central Elections Committee.

Parties are slated to begin submitting their final electoral slates to the CEC on Monday, with the final deadline to do so Tuesday at 10 p.m. The final hours are expected to be marked by a flurry of last-minute mergers, dropouts and shuffling as the lists are finalized.

The Shas political party is reportedly taking the unusual step of considering adding a lieutenant colonel in the IDF reserves to its electoral slate. The ultra-Orthodox party has been at the forefront of the fight to obtain blanket exemptions from IDF service for Haredi youth.

According to the Ynet news site, Shas’s council of rabbinic advisers convened Sunday night to approve the party’s final list, including the inclusion of Dror Amos, an IDF reservist and the head of the Haifa Religious Council.

The party has yet to publicize its final list, and it was not immediately clear if the faction’s rabbinical advisers would approve the inclusion of Amos.

The makeup of the Likud party’s final list has also yet to be publicized, with some of the reserved slots granted to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still unfilled.

According to the Channel 12 news site, Netanyahu repeatedly offered the third slot on the Likud Knesset slate, and the promise of a senior ministerial portfolio, to Beersheba Mayor Ruvik Danilovich, but the mayor turned him down every time.

Netanyahu has slots 3, 9 and 15 to allocate to personal choices on the Likud slate, and has until Tuesday night to fill them.

The TV station reported that Netanyahu sweetened his offer to Danilovich with the pledge to also make him a deputy prime minister if he forms the next government.

Danilovich was also reportedly approached by leading opposition parties including Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad and Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar. He was reportedly courted by the Labor Party in the 2019 elections and by Likud in 2022.

Meanwhile, Channel 12 also reports that a merger between Yashar and B’Yachad is looking less and less likely, because extensive surveys showed that such a partnership would send 2% of the parties’ current voters into the Netanyahu-led bloc.