There are many ways to dissent in a democracy. That is our strength, but there are also lines – of responsibility, of timing, and of loyalty – and crossing those lines carries a cost.
This week, former prime minister Ehud Olmert crossed that line.
In an interview with the BBC, Olmert denounced Israel’s conduct in Gaza in sweeping, unrestrained terms: not in the Knesset, not in the Israeli press, and not to the people who live with the consequences. He spoke instead to an international broadcaster, eager for condemnation and slow to understand the context or the cost.
When Israeli leaders, past or present, choose to denounce their own country in the pages and studios of foreign media, it is no longer internal critique. It is a political act performed for an audience hungry for confirmation of its worst assumptions, quick to strip complexity and to amplify blame, and entirely free of responsibility.
The gap between protest and political ammunition
This is not about silencing disagreement. Israelis argue with passion, conviction, and pain. We protest. We publish. We fight over the soul of this country. That is our right and often our obligation. But dissent belongs inside the civic conversation, not handed over to those who will use it to harm us.
Olmert’s words were not a call to conscience. They were not a principled act of protest. They were the outsourcing of internal reckoning to those who bear none of its weight and will gladly weaponize his words.
I say this from experience. When I lived in London and had The Times or the International Herald Tribune delivered to my door, I saw how eagerly they seized every opportunity to run a caustic piece against Israel. It didn’t matter who was in power, Left, Right, moderate, or hardline.
It didn’t matter what the context was. If the criticism came from within Israel, especially from someone with stature, they’d rush to print it. Not to grapple with complexity, but to feed a narrative of Israeli wrongdoing, they were always hungry to serve.
You want to protest, protest. You want to write, write. But write here. Speak in Hebrew. Speak to the people whose fate is bound up with yours, not to those who cheer when our standing crumbles or those who read our grief as weakness and our struggle as failure.
This isn’t protest; it’s spectacle. And in Olmert’s case, it’s a spectacle that betrays more than it reveals.
This is not moral courage. It is civic abandonment. Because in moments like this, the question of where and who you speak to is not incidental; it is everything.
I came here from Britain eight years ago, not because I had answers, but because I couldn’t stand on the outside and speak as if I understood. I came because I believed that to carry the weight of this country, you have to live it, with all its pain and all its possibilities.
If you want to shape its future, you stay in the conversation, even when it’s hard. You speak to your own people, not over them, not past them, and not in places where your words become someone else’s weapon.
That is where responsibility begins, and that is where it must remain.
The writer made aliyah from the UK.