Yair Garbuz
Yair GarbuzMoshe Shai, Flash 90

The speech delivered by ultra-leftist artist Yair Garbuz at Saturday evening's demonstration against the continued rule of the Likud party under Binyamin Netanyahu is causing outrage in nationalist circles.

“They want us to believe that the murderer of the Prime Minister came from a small, insignificant group of lunatics,” he told the crowd, many of whom had been bused in from kibbutzim around the country. “They told us that the yellow-shirted black-symboled 'Kahane was right' crowd that shouts 'death to the Arabs' was a small gang. That the evil 'price tag' people are a minuscule minority. That violence was 'negligible' among these groups.

"They kept telling us and repeating to us that the racists who threaten and curse do not represent Israeli society, they are just a handful,” Garbuz declaimed at the demonstration held in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square. “And they said that the thieves who take bribes are just a handful, and the corrupt and piggish pleasure-seekers are no more than a handful. And the destroyers of democracy are a handful, and those who think democracy means a dictatorship of the majority – a handful. The kissers of amulets, the idolaters and those who bow and prostrate themselves on the graves of holy men, just a handful. Even the sexual harassers and the rapists are a handful...

"So how is that the handful rules us? How is it that unawares, without being stopped, the handful has turned into a majority?... How is it that the handful is digging the most dangerous of tunnels beneath us – the tunnel of ignorance?”

The Likud responded by calling Garbuz's statements “revolting and racist,” noting that they are directed against “entire sectors in the state of Israel” and that they express “the deep hatred that he and his like-minded friends in the Left have toward anyone who is different from them.”