Yair Golan has a history of making outrageous claims against his political opponents.
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
An Israeli lawmaker known for his incendiary remarks about Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria used Tuesday’s deadly terror attack in Beersheba as an opportunity to criticize former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the previous right-wing government.
The attack, carried out by a Bedouin-Israeli who had already served time in prison for links to ISIS, claimed four lives.
MK Yair Golan of the left-wing Meretz party, who serves as deputy economy minister, placed the blame for the attack, which left three dead, on the former premier.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition has come under heavy scrutiny for the lack of law and order in Israel’s southern Negev desert. Golan suggested on Twitter that the current government bears no responsibility for the violence in the region.
“Always remember that every right-winger who talks about ‘governance in the Negev’ was responsible for the Negev for more than 12 years,” Golan wrote on the social media platform hours after the attack.
“Violence, poverty, terrorism and crime in the Negev are the work of Netanyahu and the right.”
In February 2021, Golan verbally attacked a high school student who disagreed with him about the correct policies for managing terror. The lawmaker was irked by a 12th grader’s suggestion that terrorists’ citizenship be revoked and charged that the student “poses a danger to Israel’s security.”
In an interview with the Knesset Channel in January 2021, Golan slammed the residents of the Homesh community in Samaria just days after yeshiva student Yehuda Dimentman was murdered by a terrorist at a nearby junction, calling those who protested the destruction of their homes shortly after the attack “are not people, these are subhumans, they are despicable.”
Golan insinuated that the residents who were forcibly evacuated from their homes should not receive sympathy from the public because, he claimed, “those people who come to settle there [in Homesh] riot in the [Arab] village of Burka, smash tombstones, make a pogrom.”
Golan blamed Homesh settlers for nearby vandalism, despite the fact that the alleged incident was still under investigation and similar claims have emerged to be false.
The former military man doubled down on his remarks by suggesting that alleged vandalism by settlers was equivalent to the widespread rapes and mass murders that Jews suffered during pogroms in eastern Europe.
“We, the Jewish people who have suffered from pogroms throughout history, now enact pogroms against others,” Golan said.
In 2018, when Golan was among the candidates to become the IDF”s chief of staff, remarks he had made in 2016 comparing Israel to Nazi Germany came to light.