On the morning of 7 October, after Hamas militants broke through Israel’s barrier with the Gaza Strip, reserve Maj Gen Yair Golan decided he could not stay at home in the central town of Rosh Ha’ayin. The scale of the attack was still unclear, but the 61-year-old put on his uniform and drove to the Home Front command headquarters, where the seriousness of the situation began to dawn on him.
“I went to the war room and I was shocked. On the big screens we could see Toyota cars moving inside Ofakim, Sderot, shooting everywhere, and I understood something terrible was happening,” he said.
Picking up a rifle from the base, he continued south to the battlefields, alone, relying on almost 40 years of combat experience to dodge Hamas on back roads through the fields to rescue people fleeing from the Nova festival. A total of 364 partygoers were massacred and another 40 taken hostage at Nova. He managed to rescue six people, only stopping the search for survivors when it got too dark to keep going.
Golan, who entered politics five years ago after a career in the army, is one of the most prominent of the many brave Israelis who took matters into their own hands that day to save others. His new image as a hero has given his political career a shot in the arm – and he has decided his new mission is to revive his country’s moribund left.
Elected in May as the leader of Israel’s centre-left Labor party with 95% of the vote, by July Golan had successfully orchestrated a merger with his former party, the leftwing Meretz. Both those parties performed poorly in the last elections: Labor, for decades the dominant force in Israeli politics, squeaked over the electoral threshold with just four Knesset seats, and Meretz, the home of the Zionist left, was wiped out altogether.
Golan is now chair of the Democrats, a progressive party that polling shows could win nine seats – giving them some influence in a potential future governing coalition – and that is not necessarily the ceiling.
“As a reservist I did my best. This is the time to move forward with other things that could be useful for Israel. My modest contribution is to make sure we have an alternative to this disastrous government. This is my role,” he said in an interview with the Guardian at the Knesset last month.
Israeli politics was already in chaos before 7 October and the ensuing war in Gaza. In December 2022, the longstanding prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, returned to office after a short stint in opposition, at the head of the most rightwing coalition in Israeli history.
The new government quickly set about toughening policy against the Palestinians and embarked on a judicial overhaul programme that many Israelis believed amounted to democratic backsliding, triggering a huge anti-overhaul protest movement.
About 60,000 protesters threatened to refuse military service as part of the protests, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) repeatedly warned Netanyahu could affect operational readiness.
Golan served as a Meretz deputy minister of economy in the short-lived “government of change” that ousted Netanyahu in 2021 before his party failed to enter the Knesset the following year. A former deputy chief of staff of the IDF, he was at the forefront of the reservists’ protests.
In the aftermath of 7 October, reservists still flocked to their bases, and the country briefly put politics aside to deal with the trauma of the Hamas attack. Netanyahu formed an emergency unity government and war cabinet that included his centrist rival, Benny Gantz, but it did not last long. On Israel’s streets, protests in favour of a hostage deal have merged with the existing anti-government camp. Calls for new elections grow stronger each week.
Israeli politics has changed, Golan said. “I’m not sure whether Israel right now is truly a democratic state any more … It is not a question of left or right any more: these titles are meaningless,” he said.
“The right today in Israel is people who think we can annex millions of Palestinians, and Israel should adopt some sort of policy of revenge, that we can live by our swords and not attempt to reconcile with the Palestinians or any other hostile entity in the region. I think 180 degrees the opposite.”
Born and raised in central Israel, Golan experimented with youth politics before he was drafted in 1980. An outstanding combat soldier in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, he quickly rose through the ranks of the IDF and holds a master’s degree in public administration policy from Harvard. His reputation as a commander was for freethinking – and outspokenness.
Golan was widely expected to become the army chief of staff, but was sidelined after giving a controversial speech in 2016 in which he drew parallels between political trends in present-day Israel and 1930s Germany. He left the IDF shortly afterwards.
Many Israeli generals go into politics, including in leftwing Zionist parties such as Meretz, but Golan was never truly at home there. He originally entered under the banner of the disbanded centre-left Israel Democratic party, a comeback attempt by the former Labor prime minister, Ehud Barak.
Speaking to the Guardian, Golan’s message as leader of the new Democrats slate was clear: while they are the only Zionist party in Israel that recognises the importance of ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories, to win votes, security is the top priority.
Gaza, he said, is a complicated war, in which Israel did not have many options. Golan believes, like the vast majority of Israelis, that Hamas must be eliminated from the Strip, and that stronger action should be taken in Israel’s north against the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah. He says he understands the risk of regional war that would entail: all five of his adult children are serving as reservists.
“Our vision is a two-state solution, but right now we are a nation in trauma. People lost their sense of security; people do not trust the IDF to protect them,” he said.
“We need to be proactive militarily, but at the same time we need to combine it with political vision. I have no intention to say it’s easy … It’s a process that will take years.”
Unlike Netanyahu’s coalition, the Democrats have outlined a plan for “the day after” the war: Israel must continue to have freedom of action in Gaza and the West Bank for the near future, Golan said, while Arab states and the US spearhead building “islands of stability” and an “alternative to Hamas” in Gaza that will involve the return of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority. Hamas-free ‘“bubbles” have already been trialled by the Israeli army in northern Gaza, with little success.
A reasonable government, he added, would rebuild relationships with allies that have soured over Netanyahu’s handling of the war, and muster international support to contain the threat posed by Iran and its proxies in the region.
“The liberal camp in Israel is still alive … We do not fight for revenge. We fight for the security of Israel,” Golan said, adding: “We cannot do it alone; we need the rest of the world with us.”
