Here is Yair Golan, the head of the opposition party called the Democrats.

So what is Israel all about? This is the issue.

We cannot escape this question anymore.

And if I take it, you know, to the American history, the question of slavery was a prominent issue from the very beginning, from 1776.

And there was so much, you know, internal struggle, and all kind of arrangements and concessions and so on and so on.

By the end of the day, it's exploded.

What, what were the most important things that people asked you? What do you think was the most important things that you addressed?

I think at first it's to understand the challenge for Israel right now, and it's a mixture of, on the one hand, deep corruption, deep, deep public corruption, uh, with, uh, extreme nationalism, with, uh, religious fundamentalism.

So this is the challenge, the, the overall challenge for the Israeli society and for Israel as a state.

We can change.

We can take responsibility for our destiny, and we can change the course, the current course, in order to bring back Israel to the very fundamental, uh, values of the Declaration of Independence, uh, to the very basic values of Judaism, and to the very basic values of, uh, humanity, and I think this is the, this is the overall issue.

How do you, how, what would you say to that community?

Yeah.

Uh, Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, not the homeland of the Israelis, the homeland of the Jewish people.

You're not part of the ͗Milāwīm. You're not, they're not part of the reserves. You are, you have, I- I will say this respectfully, you have aged out of the IDF entirely. You've aged out of the IDF reserves, so you have no... there's no expectation that you would put on your gear and start heading to the fight, right?

I was, uh, 61. Yes, I'm probably too old to be a combatant soldier, but that's what I did, and I went straight away to the headquarters of the Home Front Command. I commanded the Home Front Command, uh, more than 10 years ago. When I entered the war room and saw on the big screens the horrific events in Sderot, in Ophakim, and elsewhere around the Gaza Strip, I told the commanding officer of the Home Front Command, "Look, I would like to be your personal envoy to the South." You know, it's always very useful for a supreme commander to have someone with the same rank, with the same experience in the front, because I can see the events through his eyes. So he was very glad with this suggestion. Uh, so I took a rifle and other combatant, uh, gear and I went straight away with my private car, a small Toyota Yaris, straight to the headquarters of the Southern District of the Home Front Command, a place where terrorists penetrated and, uh, there was a kind of a massacre inside the base. Uh, so I went straight away to this location in order to help them. I reached this point, you know, just few minutes after the battle was over. I helped them to re- reorganize there. I look at the gear of the terrorists. I started to understand, you know, what was happening there, uh, the magnitude of this raid, of this terrible raid. Then, I got a phone call from my sister, and she asked me whether I can evacuate people from the Nova Festival location. I told her, "All right, what is the Nova Festival?" And it's for the first time I learned that there was a festival like that, you know, very near to the Gaza border. I asked her to, you know, se- "Please send me a location of these guys who want to, to be rescued." I look at the Google Map, you know, signs and I told myself, "All right. I know the terrain very well. I can reach them. I can take them back to safety." And that's what I did. I did these kind of tours in and out, uh, three times. Took out of the Nova Festival location six guys and, uh, you know, that was my, my very modest contribution to, to overall effort.

So my final question for you, Yair, is you're staking out in this conversation, as I, I'm sure you have in others, very stark differences with this government, but your peers on the left, obviously they're more to the center, like Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, have not staked out such stark differences with the government. I mean, they're very critical of the government, but yet whenever there's a, an issue that's presented, like the Trump vision, quote-unquote, they don't really criticize it, and they either dance around it or they actually express support for it in some way. Are you surprised? I mean, you seem to be wanting to draw very bright lines. They do not.

I think they are mistaken, and I think that it's very unfortunate to save Netanyahu over and over again. I think that the fact that Benny Gantz, in fa- in a way, saved Netanyahu, uh, during the corona crisis and also in the, the first eighth month of the war, that was a terrible mistake. But in a way, they are still my partners, and I'm the first to acknowledge that we need to work together in order to change this government and in order to build an alternative. And I know that the future alternative of Israel won't be the Democrats' alternative alone. The alternative is a kind of a national unity government with parties from the right, from the center, and from the left, and we should gather together, also with an Arab party. No problem with it. But we need to replace the current government, because I would like to re-emphasize the, the very basic fact that you cannot build a healthy nation upon corruption and nationalistic extremism.On the contrary, these elements of corruption and nationalistic extremism destroyed so many nations along the history, and we should avoid it. And this is the, the puzzling way of history concerning the national lives. It's always complicated. And in most cases, you need to choose between bad and worse. I prefer the bad with all the difficulties, with all the complexities. We need to separate ourselves from the Palestinians. No other way. Annexation is a disaster. No other solution. We need to admit it. In the Holy Land, there are pretty much the same number of Jews and Arabs, and we need to find the right way to moving forward according to the same Zionist lines of our founding fathers, emphasizing all our efforts in order to build a nation, a healthy nation, and do it in the homeland of the Jewish people, a country with a vast Jewish majority. We can handle, you know, this big Arab minority of Arabs. We want to make them partners. But we cannot annex into Israel five million Palestinians tomorrow morning. That could be the end of the Zionist project.