Israeli Press
Golan blames Ben Gvir and Smotrich for settler impunity
Image credit: Yair Golan, February 2020 — Laliv g / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
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The leader of Israel's Democrats party said on Wednesday that the state's failure to act against violent settlers in the occupied West Bank is not an oversight but the arithmetic of the governing coalition.
Yair Golan was answering a question about the national security minister's stance on administrative detention orders, at the "Time of Decision" conference run by Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth with the Israel Democracy Institute.
"When your coalition partners are Ben Gvir and Smotrich, and when the Likud itself looks like a branch of Otzma Yehudit, this is simply the political result," Golan said, in remarks Ynet published from the stage.
The instrument he was asked about#
Administrative detention is the order that holds a person without charge or trial on secret evidence. Israel applies it to Palestinians at scale — the prisoners' institutions in Ramallah count the caseload in the thousands — and to Israeli settler suspects rarely, and Itamar Ben Gvir has campaigned against using it on Jewish Israelis at all.
Golan's answer was therefore about a double standard his own state operates, put to an Israeli audience by a candidate for its premiership.
What the argument is worth, and what it is not#
Golan is a retired major general who commands ten seats in current polling and is one of the figures the anti-Netanyahu bloc would need. His party has no platform for ending the occupation, and Palestinian readers should weigh his words as an Israeli electoral argument about lawlessness rather than a promise about their rights.
The rest of his appearance was about the campaign against him. There is a systematic incitement campaign, funded in his assessment directly from the prime minister's office, he said, and he warned where the charge of treason ends: "We know how it ends. In 1995 it ended in the assassination of a prime minister."
He has sued Sara Netanyahu over statements about him and has put the case on billboards along the Ayalon highway.
The significance for Palestinians is narrow. Two weeks after Israel's own chief of staff warned the prime minister that settler crime could set the West Bank alight, the opposition's argument about that violence is being made in the language of Israeli coalition mathematics — and no Israeli party contesting this election is offering to remove the settlers themselves.
