The IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Gen. Yair Golan, unleashed a “terror attack” on the Jewish people when he controversially began comparing modern-day Israel to Nazi Germany, a prominent journalist claimed Sunday. 

Ben-Dror Yemini, a Yedioth Aharonoth columnist, stated that the bad press Golan brought upon the State of Israel was as bad as an actual attack in terms of damage to Israel’s image.

No less part of the problem, he said, were the responses to Golan. 

“I voted for the Labor party (Ed.: now the Zionist Union) in the last elections,” Yemini said on Facebook. “But the response of [Opposition leader] Buji [Yitzhak] Herzog and Tzipi Livni to the attack of the Deputy Chief [of Staff] shows something deeply wrong with the Zionist Left.”

The Zionist Left, he said, “has lost all common sense,” adding that “it’s sad for the Zionist Union and it’s sad for all of Israel.”

On Israeli Holocaust remembrance day, Golan indicated in a speech that processes that had happened in Nazi Germany could be observed “here, in our midst, today in 2016.”

Yemini’s criticism of the Left, however, does not stem from Herzog and Livni’s direct responses, but from their response to a rebuke over the remarks of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and others.  

Herzog commented Sunday that an “attempt to intimidate and silence army officers is dangerous and unprecedented,” and justified Golan’s remarks. 

Livni, meanwhile, called on Netanyahu to take action against “racism and extremism” in Israeli society, saying that Golan’s comments were “an attempt to fill the void” of proper leadership.