Israeli left-wing leader Yair Golan is standing by his words after facing a wave of criticism for suggesting that Israel “kills babies as a hobby.”
Golan is the most prominent voice in a growing chorus of Israelis who supported the war against Hamas following its Oct. 7, 2023, attack, but are now calling for the fighting to end while airing concerns about Israeli atrocities in Gaza. That mounting critique comes amid a storm of international condemnation of Israel’s decision to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. This week, Israel began to allow some aid to enter.
“Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state among the nations, what South Africa once was, if it doesn’t return to acting like a sane country,” Golan, leader of the left-wing Israeli Democratic Party, which has been rising in the polls, said on Tuesday morning. “And a sane country doesn’t conduct a war on civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby, and doesn’t set goals for itself of expelling a population.”
Golan’s remarks are especially significant because he is a former deputy chief of staff of Israel’s military. He gained widespread admiration in Israel for driving into the fighting on Oct. 7, singlehandedly rescuing people and killing Hamas terrorists.
Israel’s leaders attacked his comments, accusing him of fomenting antisemitism and besmirching Israel as well as the military he once helped lead.
“I strongly condemn Yair Golan’s wild incitement against our heroic soldiers and against the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. “The IDF is the most moral army in the world, and our soldiers are fighting in a campaign for our very existence.”
Netanyahu, who leads a hardline right-wing government, added, “Golan and his friends on the radical Left are echoing the most contemptible antisemitic blood libels against IDF soldiers and the State of Israel. There is no limit to the moral rot.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a center-left politician whose current position is meant to be above the political fray, called Golan’s comments “a severe and false slander” and a “red line.”
“Our daughters and sons are now at the front,” he tweeted. “Defending us — the nation, the state. They left their hobbies as well as their families, jobs and lives at home.”
In the firestorm, the World Jewish Congress cancelled a private talk Golan was scheduled to give to members of the organization.
Golan’s base acknowledged that his rhetoric might have gone too far when he suggested that killing babies was a “hobby” but said he had articulated a powerful and distressing reality that needed to be acknowledged. “Yair Golan spoke a truth that is uncomfortable to the Israeli ear,” the liberal newspaper Haaretz said in an editorial. “That is the most accurate explanation for the attack on MK Yair Golan from nearly the entire political spectrum.”
Golan responded later in the day — by doubling down in a much longer attack on the government’s management of the war. He clarified multiple times that his criticism was aimed at Israel’s leaders, not its soldiers. And — citing officials who have called for starvation or mass killing in Gaza — he compared the Israeli government to a Hamas mouthpiece.
“The war in Gaza began as a determined, strong and correct response to Hamas’ abominable attack, a just and necessary war to safeguard Israel’s security,” he tweeted on Tuesday evening. But he said the war had become, “due to this failing government, a war with no national or security purpose.”
He made clear that he would not apologize. “We cannot be afraid anymore. We owe that to the hostages. To the combat soldiers in the field. To Israel’s citizens, who deserve courageous leadership,” he wrote. “Our mission is to make sure Israel stays a sane country that doesn’t kill children either as a hobby or as a policy.”
He added, “A government that says we can abandon hostages and need to starve children is a government that sounds like a Hamas spokesman.”
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