שמאלני (smolani) — leftist

Etymology

The directional terms "left" and "right" acquired their political meanings on May 8, 1789, in the French Estates General. On the fourth day of King Louis XVI's summoned assembly, delegates of the Third Estate voted on two competing proposals — an anti-monarchist motion by Honoré Mirabeau and a conciliatory one by Pierre-Victor Malouet. As eyewitness Pierre-Paul Nairac recorded, voting was conducted "by inviting the assembly to divide itself so that those supporting Malouet's view would pass to the right, and those supporting Mirabeau would arrange themselves to the left." This appears to have initiated the spatial-political alignment. By August 1789, the nobility's Baron Louis-Henri-Charles de Gouville was writing that monarchist delegates had claimed seats to the right of the chairman's chair to avoid the shouting and improper behavior from the other side.

The political use of "left" and "right" disappeared during the Jacobin period, Thermidor, and the Napoleonic era, but returned decisively after Napoleon's fall in 1814, when the Bourbon Restoration brought a new parliament whose most ardent royalists sat on the right. By approximately 1820 these terms had solidified as political labels. Over the following decades the content shifted: as monarchy faded from French politics, "left" came to mean socialist and "right" anti-socialist — the alignment that spread across Western Europe and eventually the world.

Hebrew picked up the terms "שמאל" and "ימין" in political usage in the 1880s. In mandatory Palestine, with the emergence of political parties in the Yishuv, writers began speaking of "left parties" and "right parties," though the overwhelming majority of Yishuv Jews supported socialist-oriented parties. It was in this period that שמאלני emerged — the suffix -ָנִי, borrowed from words like לְאֻמָּנִי (ultra-nationalist), signals excess, caricature, or pejorative force. Right-wing circles used it as a slur for the Labor settlement movement; within the Labor movement it was used internally for the revolutionary Marxist far left who prioritized global class struggle over Jewish national struggle.

After Israel's founding, שמאלני remained mainly a term for foreign Marxist revolutionaries, partly because the Soviet Union sided with the Arab states and Soviet crimes became known to Israelis. The 1967 Six-Day War and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza triggered a second semantic revolution. Most Israelis — left and right — initially supported holding the territories. Only a small minority, many from the old socialist left, opposed the occupation. By the 1970s and 1980s, as the right-left divide reoriented around the settlement project rather than economic ideology (both sides having adopted free-market reforms), שמאלני came to mean specifically those calling for withdrawal from the territories. In the 1980s, when support for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians spread among moderate left voters, they were surprised to find themselves called "שמאלנים" — a term one reader in a 1986 letter to the editor of Chadashot described as "a widely used pejorative in the mouths of the right, usually with the addition of 'beautiful soul,' typically delivered with a snort of contempt."

Key Quotes

"על ידי הזמנת האספה לחלק את עצמה כך שאלה התומכים בדעתו של מאלואט יעברו לצד ימין ואלה שתמכו במיראבו יסדרו את עצמם בשמאל" — Pierre-Paul Nairac, eyewitness account of the Estates General vote, May 8, 1789

"מלת גנאי נפוצה בפי הימנים, בדרך-כלל בתוספת 'יפה נפש', שנהגית בדרך-כלל בליווי נחירת בוז" — Amir Rubenstein, letter to the editor, Chadashot, November 1986

Timeline

• May 8, 1789: "Left" and "right" seating established in the French Estates General
• August 1789: Spatial-political alignment confirmed in nobleman's memoir
• ~1820: "Left" and "right" established as standard French political terms
• Mid-19th c.: Left comes to mean socialist, right anti-socialist, across Western Europe
• 1880s: שמאל and ימין enter Hebrew political discourse
• Late 1940s–early 1950s: שמאלני coined and used in Israeli political discourse
• 1967–1970s: Six-Day War triggers semantic shift; שמאלני increasingly means opponent of occupation
• 1980s: שמאלני becomes a right-wing slur for those supporting Palestinian negotiations
• 21st c.: Another semantic shift underway — left-right split returns to pro/anti-democratic governance

Related Words

• שְׂמֹאל — left (direction and political orientation)
• יָמִין — right (direction and political orientation)
• יַמְנִי — right-winger (parallel form)
• שְׂמֹאלָנוּת — leftism (abstract noun)
• לְאֻמָּנִי — ultra-nationalist (parallel suffix usage)