Sam The Faux Ferret 🇺🇸

Yair Golan—former IDF deputy chief of staff and leader of the “Democrats”, a hard-left party formed of the cumulative mergers over decades of a series of far-left, even Stalinist groups into Israel’s once-hegemonic Labor Party—wants his erstwhile allies in the failed (for it has indeed failed) “anti-Netanyahu anti-Haredi change coalition”, Eisenkot, Lapid, Bennett and Lieberman, to use these Hamas sympathisers of the Joint List, who here dedicate their results “to Gaza”, to oust the Zionist right and Netanyahu, even as the IDF battles to mop up the remnants of Hamas in Gaza. This eventuality would be Netanyahu’s fever dream—a martyrdom at the hands of a left-Islamist alliance he could paint as traitors—to be followed inevitably by a Jesus-like revival after three months. They failed in their attempt to build a “change coalition” because they didn’t have a positive message. “We hate the Haredi and Netanyahu and we are gonna stick it to ’em” isn’t enough to win a majority. It also won’t be enough to justify to their electorates at the next election—which will be very soon if Yair Golan’s plan wins out—why they allied with actual enemies. This is a choice they actually can’t make anyway, since a number in their 48-ish-sized bloc won’t go along with it. So it’s just moot, and the merely performative act of floating it is damaging to their cause. But amazingly, this man who, but for a speech comparing IDF soldiers to the Third Reich on Memorial Day, would have replaced Eisenkot as IDF chief of staff in 2019, is no great strategic thinker.