Launching election campaign, Democrats’ Golan says blood spilled in West Bank is on PM’s hands

The left-wing Democrats party kicked off its election campaign at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday with a pledge to keep criminal defendants out of office and a goal of controlling the education and justice ministries in the next government.

Activists also held an anti-government protest elsewhere in Tel Aviv, and far-left demonstrators protesting “apartheid” in the West Bank blocked a road, prompting police to arrest nine people.

The Rabin Square rally in front of the Tel Aviv city hall was attended by about 1,000 people, many of them in blue Democrats shirts. They chanted “Democracy” in the style of the past three years’ anti-government protests, and similarly chanted “Democrats.”

Party leader Yair Golan was introduced as “the leader whose feet are firm on the ground but whose eyes look out into the distance,” who formed the Democrats by merging Israel’s legacy left-leaning parties Labor and Meretz, as well as various protest groups, in a “historic union that will change the face of the country for generations to come.”

Golan said the party was “embarking on the most fateful battle ever for the future of the State of Israel.”

“From this night on we’re going out into the field and speaking with every single Israeli and bringing in one million votes,” he said, to applause. That figure would likely land the party almost 30 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, though polls typically show the party receiving about 10 seats in the October 27 election.

Speakers also railed against settler violence and called for dismantling settler outposts in the West Bank.

The Democrats were lambasted by figures to their left on Friday, after Golan and other top members described as Palestinian terrorism the deadly gunfight that took place between locals and settlers who illegally entered the Nablus-area Palestinian village of Tell. Two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed in the clash, which then sparked dozens of settler raids on villages across the West Bank, as well as a major IDF crackdown.

Referring to the West Bank shoot-out, Golan accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz of deliberately turning the West Bank “on the eve of the election into a violent arena that endangers human life.”

“Our soldiers’ blood that has been spilled, and that unfortunately is yet to be spilled, is on their hands,” Golan said, vowing to dismantle “[National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir’s armed militias and [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich’s outposts” so that “our dear IDF will return to its supreme mission — protecting the State of Israel.”

“We’ll lead a political-security-regional initiative that will restore sanity,” he said.

Golan also vowed to cancel the current government’s judicial overhaul laws, form a state commission of inquiry into the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, and pass legislation barring criminal defendants — such as Netanyahu — from running for prime minister.

MK Naama Lazimi, who nabbed the No. 2 spot on the Democrats electoral slate after winning the party’s primaries this week, said she was seeking to replace “commissar Yoav Kisch” as education minister and clean up the “religious coercion, nationalism and racism” that Kisch’s arch-conservative allies have injected into school curricula.

“The education system will be proud to discuss equality, democracy, human and civil rights, mutual accountability, coexistence and peace,” said Lazimi, also vowing to imbue children with the values of “humanistic Judaism.”

“Especially after yesterday’s events, the education system we’ll establish will deplore fascism and messianic nationalism,” Lazimi said. “We won’t let our children serve as private security guards for the Hilltop [Youth] hooligans in illegal outposts who perpetrate Jewish terror in the territories.”

At the end of the rally, supporters marched on to a weekly anti-government protest on Habima Square.

At that rally, Gal Goren, whose parents Maya and Avner were killed in the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, accused the government of purposely fomenting chaos and violence.

“The needless death in the village of Tell expresses the deliberate chaos more than anything: the lives of Israelis and Palestinians keep being taken in a cruel game that we’re being kept in by design,” said Goren. “This state refuses to take heed and responsibility.”

More anti-government protests were held around the country, including in Jerusalem, Haifa, Beersheba and Zichron Yaakov.

In the capital, demonstrators marched to the area of the Knesset to disband an encampment calling for elections that was erected there in November 2023 by Yaakov Godo, whose son Tom was killed in the October 7 assault. Elections have now been called for October 27, the latest date on which they could have been held by law.

Later, at a far-left demonstration on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street against settler violence and Israel’s military rule of the West Bank, police arrested nine people after some protesters blocked the road and disrupted traffic, according to a police statement and video published by both police and activists on the scene.

The footage showed nine youths standing on the east-bound road at the intersection with Da Vinci Street and unfurling a banner adorned with a large X that reads, in Hebrew, “Israel, not a democracy, apartheid.”

כ־200 מפגינות ומפגינים יצאו היום להפגין נגד הכיבוש ונגד טרור המתנחלים.

נראה שגם המשטרה קצת התגעגעה. אחרי תקופה ארוכה שבה ייבשנו אותם, בטח כבר היה חסר להם קצת להפגין שרירים מול מי שמוחה. הפעם זה נגמר אחרת – וטוב שכך.

כמו תמיד, נמשיך להגיע. לא כדי להתעמת, אלא כדי להתעקש על קול… pic.twitter.com/Sh2vR2O37C

— אימהות נגד אלימות ???? Mothers against violence (@imahot4) July 25, 2026

Over a dozen police and border police officers rushed the youths, who fell to the road and held onto the banner as the officers pulled it away and then hauled them off. Other protesters closed in, chanting “officer, officer, whom are you protecting,” and were pushed back onto the sidewalk.

The demonstration “took place without approval and was not coordinated with police,” the statement said.

While small such demonstrations frequently take place on a grassy area near the Kaplan-Da Vinci interchange, Saturday night’s protest did not appear on a police list of approved marches.

The Arab-majority communist party Hadash and other groups had on Friday announced they would hold “rage protests” the following night in Haifa and at the Kaplan interchange against “settler terrorism.”