By: Yossi Klein Halevi /Haaretz (adapted)

No one votes for the center-left party. There are center-left parties, but they are superficial; the center-left party for us is to separate religion from the state. However, it is not Zionist, as Zionists are the colonial settlers and soldiers like Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir.

What is meant by Zionism now? After establishing the Jewish people's "national home," Zionism faded, but the motto remained ambiguous and open to interpretation. And what controls the situation today is religious nationalism. Under its auspices, Zionism committed dreadful crimes. Thus, it accused its critics outside of "anti-Semitism" and its critics inside of being " unpatriotic." The nationalism vanished as well. The Zionism of settlers and Yigal Amir's nationalism (who assassinated the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin) added power to the extremist religious nationalism, which defeated the secular-left party.

The center-left party is defeated and Zionism becomes a completely extremist religious nationalism. Generations of students have been taught that equality and citizen's rights are leftist and Ashkenazic, but not national, and it's possible to live without them. They must guarantee to protect themselves from Iran.

 Leftists easily relinquished their government positions and went about their business. To put it another way, they became completely bourgeois and pressed themselves into the small political folds assigned to them by Meretz and the Labor Party, abandoning the recruitment of the working class and poor people to their league and leaving a huge gap that has been filled by extreme religious nationalism, to which the poor and marginalized have joined.

The leftists now have two electoral options. The first is to elect one of its positions that is closer to the leftist ones. The second option is called “closing the nose,” which means electing someone who does not like him but frightens him to a lesser degree. Whoever prefers the second option will not be elected any day, an ineffective left party will not choose a non-Zionist party that includes Arabs and Jews.