The brouhaha over the speech by Israel Defense Forces Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan — which continues to reverberate even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on May 10 that it is "behind us" — proves that something has gone deeply wrong with the traditional division between Israel's political right and left.

Golan picked a problematic day on which to make his comments, May 4, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and his hard-hitting comparison between 1930s European Nazism and current trends in Israeli society stung. The remarks themselves should have been a matter of course in the kind of democratic society that Israel aspires to be.

Golan sought to warn against such phenomena as the July 2015 arson attack against a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma and against crimes of hatred and racism, stating, "Nothing is easier and simpler than bestial behavior, moral corruption and self-righteousness. On Holocaust Remembrance Day we would do well to discuss our capacity to uproot from within us the budding indications of intolerance, of violence and of self-destruction that pave the road to moral decline." Does the Israeli right not share these sentiments as an expression of a democratic philosophy?

The question that should have arisen — why not a single right-wing politician, except for Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, defended Golan's comments or at least his right to make them — did not. Golan was immediately labeled a leftist, reflecting the blurring of the traditional dichotomy between right and left in Israel, which since 1967 had always focused on the issue of the occupied territories.