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.