Israelis Love to Call Each Other Cossacks Who’ve Been Robbed

“You are fueling these violent demonstrations. You’re hypocrites, crying like the Cossack who was robbed.”—Dudi Amsalem, Likud cabinet minister, addressing the anti-Netanyahu Israeli left in a July 27 Knesset speech.

“All over Israel, the protests are growing and spreading, and with them the violent [right-wing] gangs with their criminal excesses in the name of the Cossack of Balfour Street [the site of the Jerusalem home of Prime Minister Netanyahu] who was robbed.”—Political commentator Yossi Verter, in a July 31 article in Haaretz, defending the demonstrators against the verbal and physical attacks on them.

A versatile fellow, this Cossack, identified simultaneously with Israel’s prime minister and his bitterest opponents! Who is he and who robbed him?

The common Israeli expression ha-kozák ha-nigzál, “the robbed Cossack” or “the Cossack who was robbed,” denotes a serial wrongdoer who accuses others of the wrongs he habitually commits. The expression comes from the Yiddish kozák hanígzol, which means the same thing. Its source might possibly be a Jewish joke about the Cossack who fell through the roof of a Sukkah on which he was crawling in the hope of spying something beneath it to steal. Asked what he had been doing there, he answered, “I was looking for my stolen horse.”