Zionist Union MK Shelly Yacimovich, the social-democratic champion of assuring workers’ rights, narrowing economic gaps, battling tycoons and fighting the theft of Israel’s natural gas reserves, portrays herself as a nationalist-socialist leader. Despite the jarring connotation of that term, nothing is more accurate.

Yacimovich’s blatant denunciation of her party colleague Zouheir Bahloul when he said “soldiers are the symbols of the occupation” and hence, someone “who stabs a soldier is a murderer, not a terrorist,” expressed her nationalist-socialist ideology in a pure, unequivocal way.

“What's a Palestinian groaning under the occupation’s weight for 49 years supposed to do?” asked Bahloul. But apparently Yacimovich doesn’t recognize the existence of the occupation. Her terms of justice don’t apply to Palestinians.

“I reject the definition of the IDF as an occupation army,” she declared on a Channel 10 news program. “My son, who is an officer in the reserves and served for years as a career officer, and my daughter, who’s an officer in the army, aren’t soldiers in an occupation army, but rather in the Israel Defense Forces.”

This is an astonishing statement. Yacimovich argues, plain and simple, that there’s no occupation. She’s in favor of the obviously irrelevant two-state solution, solely to keep Israel a “Jewish and democratic” state.

She doesn’t give a damn about the Palestinians’ rights. They’re nothing to her. She thinks a Palestinian who stabs a soldier in Hebron isn’t engaging in the legitimate resistance of a people under occupation, because the Palestinians aren’t a people under occupation, and the soldier in Hebron isn’t an occupier. He’s in Hebron as part of his army service in defense of Israel.

This is justice according to Yacimovich – for Jews only. Her justice is “Zionist,” as she calls it. Her morality isn’t universal. Calling her a social democrat is a disgrace to social democracy. Her disgraceful take on the Palestinians has nothing to do with socialist or democratic tradition. She’s a nationalist-socialist leader.

Open gallery view Zionist Union MK Shelly Yacimovich during a Knesset Education Committee meeting, December 2015. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi

As such, she explains condescendingly, Bahloul’s refusal to call a Palestinian who stabs a soldier a terrorist and his preference for the term murderer has no place in the school she’s running. This is the Jewish school where Bahloul is a wayward Palestinian student, a token being patronizingly integrated.

Yacimovich’s support for the two-state solution is the only thing that distinguishes her from right-winger Naftali Bennett. But this solution is inapplicable. Yacimovich won’t be able to evacuate more than 100,000 settlers from the West Bank, so her support is empty posturing that will never be put to the test.

Thus her only relevant political position is that there’s no occupation. As the occupier, she will tell the occupied what legitimate resistance to a non-occupation is.

When Bahloul says the most obvious thing, “soldiers are the symbols of the occupation,” Yacimovich objects deeply, both on ideological and moral grounds. “I’m not there,” she says.

And it’s a good thing she says so. This isn’t about electoral considerations. She can’t be naive enough to believe she can steal votes from the right wing. She simply can’t see her children as soldiers in an occupation army. The gap between her perception of her children and reality creates an unbearable dissonance.

Her only way out is denial of reality. There is no occupation. It doesn’t exist. The army may indeed “have control of the West Bank,” but for defense reasons only. Zionist reasons.

It’s time the left-wingers who support Yacimovich understood – her values are not our values, her beliefs are not our beliefs.