Left out An Israeli politician's fight for democracy

In the morning of 7 October, after Hamas militants broke through Israel's barrier with the Gaza Strip, reserve Maj Gen Yair Golan decided he could not stay at home in the central town of Rosh Ha'ayin.

- Bethan McKernan

The scale of the attack was still unclear, but the 61-year-old put on his uniform and drove to the home front command headquarters, where the seriousness of the situation began to dawn on him.

"I went to the war room and I was shocked. On the big screens we could see Toyota cars moving inside Ofakim, Sderot, shooting everywhere, and I understood something terrible was happening," he said.

Picking up a rifle from the base, he continued south to the battlefields, alone, relying on almost 40 years of combat experience to dodge Hamas on back roads through the fields to rescue people fleeing from the Nova festival. A total of 364 partygoers were massacred and another 40 taken hostage at Nova. He managed to rescue six people, only stopping the search for survivors when it got too dark to keep going.

Golan, who entered politics five years ago after a career in the army, is one of the most prominent of the many brave Israelis who took matters into their own hands that day to save others. His new image as a hero has given his political career a shot in the arm - and he has decided his new mission is to revive his country's moribund left.

Elected in May as the leader of Israel's centre-left Labor party with 95% of the vote, by July Golan had successfully orchestrated a merger with his former party, the leftwing Meretz.

Both those parties performed poorly in the last elections: Labor, for decades the dominant force in Israeli politics, squeaked over the electoral threshold with just four Knesset seats, and Meretz, the home of the Zionist left, was wiped out altogether.