Jews Against Themselves: Israel’s Coming Elections
By: Ron Jager
With Israel’s national elections just around the corner, the political discourse has reached an unprecedented low point exemplified by political toxicity alongside the demonization of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his many supporters who are portrayed by the mainstream progressive media as mindless baboons, intellectually deficient, primitive, and unable to understand and appreciate the complexities of the progressive agenda. Many of the political campaign messages on social media against Netanyahu and his supporters reek from a stench of racism. However, there is a silver lining to the October 27 election day. There is a marked change, one can feel it in the air; the progressive delusion of peace with the Palestinian Arabs and the two-state solution are no longer believed to be attainable by the majority of the Jewish public in Israel. The majority of the Jewish public have overcome withdrawal symptoms and detoxified from the delusion and false hopes of surrendering sovereign territory to Palestinian control. There is a translucent quality to how the barbaric October 7 invasion of Israel by the Palestinian terror organization Hamas, has revealed a clarity concealed for years by the left wing and progressive political parties. Since the heyday of the Oslo Agreement, the deadly intentions of the Palestinian Arabs to commit genocide against the State of Israel have been belittled or denied, aided and abetted by the progressive media, the judicial system, academia, and the state’s attorney general’s office.
Jews in Israel who identify themselves as conservatives, as religious, as Sephardim, and as Mizrachim will no longer accept the progressive agenda replete with half-truths and outright lies. Israel’s Jewish identity will no longer be subservient to politicians who pander away the very foundations of the Israeli republic as the homeland of the Jewish nation.
An example of the depths of depravation that progressive politicians have reached during the current election cycle is Ret. General Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff in the IDF and the head of one of Israel’s leftist progressive parties. He has expressed a series of harsh and shocking remarks: he has publicly declared his intention when elected to “remove religion from the public sphere,” called for civil disobedience among active reserve soldiers as a legitimate response to the judicial reform legislation proposed by the governing coalition, and posted an outrageous lie in a malicious statement reaching millions of social media followers throughout the world that “IDF soldiers kill Palestinian babies as a hobby.” This comes at a time when the State of Israel is dealing with an existential military campaign against no less than seven military fronts, with Iran at the head of the list, and with an international campaign promoting political, economic, and military boycotts of Israel by falsely accusing Israel of starving civilians in the Gaza Strip and murdering innocent civilians. The progressive calls for insubordination, for sanctions against Israel, and deliberately harming the wellbeing of IDF soldiers during wartime are no longer just internal political rhetoric. These words and false accusations have become a threat to Israel’s state security, not unnoticed by a majority of the voting public in Israel, nor the mobs yelling for the destruction of Israel throughout the world.
Israel’s progressive politicians, such as Yair Golan, would be unable to survive the current election cycle without the financial and organizational assistance of progressive American Jews and organizations that actively support anti-Jewish, antisemitic, and anti-Israel political agendas primarily among representatives of the Democratic Party in the United States and radical progressive politicians in Europe as well. Not surprisingly, Jews are behind progressive organizations spreading blood libels against the Jews and the State of Israel and fueling the anti-Jew and anti-Israel campaign taking over the streets of America and Europe.
J Street is an organization that describes itself as “pro-Israel” and proclaims itself “devoted and committed to Israel’s future.” Yet, J Street misses no opportunities to blacken Israel’s reputation and is always on the side of international campaigns to delegitimize the State of Israel. J Street has actively endorsed Brad Lander, a Democrat who is running for New York’s 10th Congressional District. Lander, who is Jewish and an outspoken critic of the Israeli government, believes that Israel cannot be a true democracy while it continues to occupy the West Bank (aka Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, supports the restriction of U.S. military aid to Israel and believes that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza after the October 7 invasion and massacre by Hamas against Israeli civilians amounts to genocide. Lander has been endorsed by and is an ally of NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken antisemite who threatened to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit to UN headquarters in NYC.
J Street is not alone. Similar Jewish organizations have been proliferating in recent years both here and abroad. In the United States, they include, among others, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Free Palestine, and Jews for Justice in the Middle East.
Much the same thing has now taken place in the UK’s Green Party, led by Zack Polanski, who is gay and of Jewish descent, and who had copied Bernie Sanders by basing his identity on bashing Israel. On October 4, 2026, Green Party members passed a motion defining Zionism as support for an ethnonationalist Jewish state and endorsed a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine. When a Somali Muslim man stabbed two Jewish people in an attack that Iran claimed responsibility for, Zack Polanski condemned the police officers for using force to stop the terrorist. Green Party candidates actively support Hamas and have argued that ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. A Green Party resolution was introduced and calls for “Zionists” to be “hunted” worldwide demanding the destruction of Israel and threatening to ban Jews attending synagogues considered to be “Zionist.”
Begging to be asked: have Jews always caused the greatest damage to themselves? Over the centuries, there has been ample evidence discovered between Jewish collaborators and the world’s antisemites, making for a distinctive Jewish contribution to the politics and proliferation of antisemitism. Hellenistic Jews at the time of the Maccabees and the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews suffered primarily because of the mutual hatred and undermining one another. During the Middle Ages the apostate Pablo Christiani prevailed upon King Louis IX to compel his former brethren, per papal edict, to wear an identifying badge. At the dawn of the 15th century, another apostate, Johannes Pfefferkorn, came to prominence preaching the message that “Who afflicts the Jews is doing the will of G-d, and who seeks their benefit will incur damnation.” During the modern era, progressives have inverted their message to describe Jews who proclaim their love of Israel even as they slander it. Peter Beinart, dubbed as the “the soul of J Street” and claims that Israel’s worst (and sole) enemy is itself. Marc Ellis, an avid and publicly visible supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an academician, and formerly the director of Jewish studies at Baylor University, proudly spent a Yom Kippur repenting not his own transgressions in the sanctity of a synagogue but “publicly confessing the sins of (other) Jews against Palestinian Arabs” in front of a Christian audience.
Our enemies succeed only because we weaken ourselves and offer ourselves for slaughter on a silver platter. The coming elections in Israel have evolved into a defining moment not only in Israel’s historical role but for Jews everywhere. Will the progressive forces succeed in destroying our national unity by promoting hatred of those that have learned the lessons of October 7? In trying to prove themselves enlightened and above others, the progressive forces with all their cohorts will only create more suffering and bring on an existential danger on Israel and Jews everywhere throughout the world.
Ron Jager grew up in the South Bronx of New York, making aliyah in 1980. Ron is a 25-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, where he served as a field mental-health officer and as commander of the central psychiatric military clinic for reserve soldiers at Tel-Hashomer. Since retiring from active duty, he has been providing consultancy services to NGOs, implementing psychological trauma and psychological education programs to communities in the North and South of Israel. Ron served as a strategic adviser to the chief foreign envoy of Judea and Samaria. To contact him, e-mail [email protected]. Read more of Ron Jager’s articles at 5TJT.com.
