When Unity Dies, So Do Defenders

Why Pro Israel Advocacy Will Never Work and Why I Will Most Likely Stop

I call it disillusionment. But that word is too soft for what this really is. This is a suffocating feeling of disappointment and grief. A deep exhaustion of the soul.

Since November 18, 2014, I have been busy with Israel advocacy nonstop. Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week. Every single night, around four in the morning, I start posting content on social media. LinkedIn is my main platform, where I have built the largest following, almost 110,000 people. People often ask me where my memes come from. Some are sent to me. Some I come across while reading. Many I create myself or adapt. On my phone alone there are more than 10,000 images, of which roughly 7,000 are Israel related memes.

With every post, I try to write accurate historical information. Not opinions pulled out of thin air, but facts shaped by years of conversations, history lessons, countless books, and the most important source of all, actually having lived in the Middle East. On both sides. The Arab side in Syria. The Israeli side in Jerusalem.

People who know me call me tireless. I keep going until the very last drop. Giving up is not a word that lives easily in my vocabulary.

And yet here I am. At my breaking point.

A few days ago, I posted a meme about the historical timeline of Judaism. Carefully made. As always, I added a border with the name of Time To Stand Up For Israel and wrote my own explanatory text. Yesterday, I received an angry message from a man accusing me of cutting his name off the meme. I explained calmly that this was not intentional. The image was already on my phone. I have thousands. I genuinely did not know its origin.

He said he believed me. He said it was fine if I credited him the next time I posted it. Fine. No problem.

Then today, on Shabbat, he suddenly accused me of lying. According to him, only on my post was his name missing. I repeated myself. I explained again. It did not matter. I was a liar. Apparently this man spent his entire Shabbat stewing in anger over a meme without his name on it.

I told him I would take the post down. I simply did not have time immediately because I was busy writing blogs for Israel. His response was a threat. I have screenshots of everything.

After wasting far too much mental energy on something that should never have mattered, I found a likely explanation. Facebook often shows me memories from Instagram. On Instagram, images are frequently cropped. The full picture does not always fit. I probably saved it from there.

But in the end, none of that matters.

I run Time To Stand Up For Israel alone. Every morning at four I start posting. Then I go to my regular job. After that I write a blog. Then I go to my second job. Israel has always been my priority. Always.

And yet it is slowly breaking me.

You can post thousands of times per year. You can sacrifice sleep, money, mental health, and personal life. You receive no recognition. No support. No donations, except for one or two rare souls. And then you make one mistake. One. And you are dragged through the mud.

Israel is losing the media war. And this is why.

Everything has a price tag now. Almost nothing is done out of love or ideology anymore. Outsiders are always viewed with suspicion. The sense of unity among Israelis themselves has been eroding for years, something I noticed painfully already in 2022. But if you are not Israeli, you can forget about cooperation, understanding, or even basic respect.

Always assuming the worst of others is not Israel. Or at least, it should not be. And more than rockets, more than terror, more than war, this frightens me the most. Because without unity, without love, without compassion, the Israeli soul will die. And if that happens, a struggle of thousands of years will be lost from the inside.

I have given myself a little more time. A final window. If there are no donations, no support, no subsidies, then I too will stop advocating for Israel. As much as it hurts to write those words.

The land of Israel lives unconditionally in my heart. But with the people, that connection is fading. And I wish with everything in me that there were a way to make that clear without sounding bitter or broken.

Israel, unite.
Because without unity, you are already lost.