On the morning of October 7, Nir Gontage, journalist for the daily Haaretz, desperately tries to save his son Amir, who has taken refuge in an orchard near the Nova music festival. Around the 23-year-old young man, dozens of heavily armed Hamas terrorists shoot festival-goers on sight. On the phone, Amir describes an apocalypse scene to his father. “He was telling me that he was being shot at and I could hear the shots in the phone,” says Nir Gontage. Driving at 180 kilometers per hour and running all the red lights, the father descends at full speed towards the south of Israel. But he finds himself blocked by the police 15 kilometers from the festival.
Desperate, Gontage learns on social networks of the presence of Yaïr Golan at the scene of the massacres. Opposition MP and reserve general, Golan headed to the Gaza region as soon as the Hamas invasion was announced. “I called Yaïr Golan, traces Nir Gontage. He asked that my son send a location by WhatsApp then told me that he was going to pick him up. And indeed, he brought him back safe and sound. His mother said gave life to my son in 2000. Yaïr Golan gave him life again in 2023.”
In horror, Golan becomes a symbol of unity
That morning, Yaïr Golan will have rescued at least six people from the hell of October 7. Former deputy chief of staff of the army, familiar with urban combat, he also coordinated the action of dozens of Israelis in civilian clothes flocking spontaneously to the Gaza region. Just the day before, Yaïr Golan was just an ordinary left-wing politician. On October 7, he became a national hero, emblematic of a society united in the ordeal beyond its fierce ideological clashes. “I hated you for your political opinions, now I love you. Forgive me for this hatred,” a young Orthodox woman told him as he returned to the outskirts of Gaza with an Israeli television crew.
Sincerely convinced that he only did his duty, Yaïr Golan knows that his bravery paid off big for him electorally. On May 28, Labor Party activists elected him to lead their party with more than 95% of the vote. Sacred. Wishing for an alternative to the government of Benyamin Netanyahu, “the most failed in the history of Israel”, Golan promised to revive a moribund Labor Party, never really recovered from the failure of the Oslo Accords in the early 2000s. Credited with a handful of deputies in the polls in the event of early elections, Golan will have to face the two heavyweights of the opposition to Netanyahu: the centrist Benny Gantz and the social democrat Yaïr Lapid. The blows are already starting to rain.
The controversy concerns an explosive subject in Israel. A few days after his victory in the Labor primary, Yair Golan called on IDF reservists – an essential resource of the Israeli army – to refuse to serve as long as Netanyahu rules the country. Huge outcry on the right but also within the party of Benny Gantz, himself a former chief of staff. “We do not refuse orders, we do not refuse to serve in the army. I say it to Yaïr Golan and to all political leaders: leave the army out of controversies,” criticized the opposition leader , member of the war cabinet.
“This guy is dangerous for Israel”
Voluntarily or not, Gantz is investigating a long-standing leftism trial. In 2016, Yaïr Golan caused a scandal by comparing the radicalization of the Israeli right to the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. The same in 2020 when, in the name of freedom of expression, he defends the right to Arab member of the Knesset to pay tribute to Samir Kuntar, a famous Lebanese terrorist who killed a little Israeli girl with his own hands in 1979. “This guy is dangerous for Israel,” a Channel 14 columnist declared this week, the equivalent of CNews in Israel.
The road to power promises to be long and complicated for Yaïr Golan. If he seems to have succeeded in uniting the protesters on Kaplan, the avenue in Tel Aviv where tens of thousands of opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu gather every Saturday evening, he will have to prove his ability to bring together beyond the left pure and simple. “Although Yair Golan is seen as an easy opponent for Netanyahu, who will emphasize his radicalism, the battle between Golan, Gantz and Lapid is only beginning to know who will lead the center-left bloc,” announces political analyst Ouri Vertman.
Yaïr Golan’s political destiny will obviously depend on the evolution of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. If Benjamin Netanyahu fails to bring back the hostages and defeat the terrorist organization, the hero of October 7 will have a good time asserting that only the left knows how to protect Israel, as in the days of David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Rabin. A heavy legacy to bear.
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