There is a kind of theft that leaves the safe untouched: you don’t break the lock, you redefine what’s inside it. Yair Golan, the former IDF deputy chief of staff who now leads The Democrats – the merged remnant of Labor and Meretz – has built a political identity on a single freighted word.
His party calls itself “the political home of the liberal-democratic camp”; his campaign promises a “democratic, free, broad-based, and strongly Zionist” alternative.
Who could object? Which is exactly why “democracy” is the most useful word to capture. But beneath that banner is a program, and it is not a defense of democracy – it is a contest over what kind of state the Jewish state is allowed to be.
Consider what Golan and his party have committed to.
They have pledged to repeal the Nation-State Law – the Basic Law stating the simplest of facts: that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.
They have made conscripting yeshiva students a centerpiece, casting citizens whose lives revolve around Torah study as freeloaders.
These are not isolated planks but one architecture, leaning on the religious status quo that has held since the founding.
The contested meaning of 'democracy'
And here the history is told backward. Shabbat as the day of rest, kashrut in state kitchens, rabbinical marriage and divorce, and the exemption for a few hundred yeshiva students – none of it was imposed by a foreign power.
It was the founding covenant of the state, set down by Ben-Gurion in his 1947 letter to Agudat Yisrael, so that a Jewish state would be recognizably Jewish, not merely a country of Jews.
Ben-Gurion was no rabbi; he was a secular socialist who grasped what his self-styled heirs do not – a Jewish state stripped of its Jewish substance is just real estate with a flag.
To dismantle that covenant is a legitimate argument. What is not honest is to do it while calling the dismantling a “democracy.” In its true meaning, democracy is rule by a people – this people, with its memory, calendar, and covenant.
In the new usage, “democratic” narrows to one set of outcomes – secular, progressive, and universalist – with everything Jewish recoded as backward and coercive.
Once the vocabulary is captured, the argument ends before it begins: to defend Shabbat is to oppose democracy; to defend the yeshiva world is to oppose equality.
We have watched this across the West, where the progressive Left – loudest of all in the name of justice and democracy – hollowed out the institutions that gave those words meaning: family, faith, and nation.
It is never called demolition; it is always called progress – liberalism turned against the soil that grew it.
And we are asked to entrust this to a man with a habit of incendiary speech – the same Golan who in 2025 said on national radio that Israel was becoming a pariah state that “kills babies as a hobby,” a charge so reckless it drew condemnation from Lapid, Gantz, and Herzog, from the very camp he claims to lead, before he walked it back.
A man so quick to indict the nation’s character abroad is no credible guardian of its foundations at home.
His defenders will note that Golan calls himself a Zionist, ran toward the fire on October 7, and frames the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft as shared sacrifice, not a war on Judaism – and that most Israelis agree the burden must be shared.
Some of that is fair; the inequity of service is a real grievance. But shared sacrifice can be argued in daylight; it does not require repealing the law that names us the nation-state of the Jewish people or branding Torah study as theft.
When a reasonable demand is bundled with the unmaking of the state’s foundations and stamped “democracy,” the bundling is the tell.
This is not a brief against criticism or reform but against the theft of a word.
In a Jewish state, Jewish identity and democratic self-government are not rivals but two halves of one promise – the one Ben-Gurion made and which Golan would quietly revoke.
The gravest attack on democracy is not the one that storms the gate; it is the one that walks through it carrying democracy’s own name. We should not surrender the word – nor pretend we cannot see what travels beneath it.