Ego Is Killing Israel Advocacy

Where did our fight for Israel go? Where did our courage, common sense, and decency , the things that should bind us, evaporate into ego, petty competition, and calculated silence?

I’ll be blunt: the pro-Israel movement is bleeding out from within. Not from lack of facts, not from a shortage of courage on the battlefield, but from the banal, corrosive human weaknesses that should be beneath us: ego, greed, cowardice, and an astonishing tolerance for disunity. I’m not judging from some ivory tower. I was born into a military family, saw the world young, learned the harsh lessons of being “different,” and built my life around action, not performative posts. For the last eleven years I’ve run Time To Stand Up For Israel, posting day and night, doing the work others preach about. What I’ve watched, up close, is devastating.

Start with the social-media slaughterhouse. Platforms designed for networking turned into weapons for those who want Israel erased from the map of public opinion. I’ve been reported, banned, and shadowed. So have others. A friend, a valuable entrepreneur with three companies,  was deleted from LinkedIn last week. He depended on that platform. He asked for help. Nobody rallied. Where were the “influencers” who parachute in with virtue when it benefits them and disappear when it gets costly?

This is not an isolated anecdote. Since October 7, 2023, when Israel entered a fight for its very existence, we needed a united front. Instead we got factionalism. We have people openly protesting the Israeli government while our soldiers and civilians were being killed and kidnapped. We have papers and pundits using externally invented vocabulary,  “settlers,” “the West Bank,” “settlement”, language that frames Israeli citizens as interlopers in their own homeland while legitimizing the narratives of hostile regimes. We have dozens of organizations reinventing the wheel, running competing initiatives, and refusing to cooperate. Events go unshared; resources go duplicated; opportunities to present a single, compelling narrative are squandered for the next personal brand boost or donor pitch.

Let’s call this what it is: malpractice. When the enemy’s strategy is to exploit division, we hand them the map.

Examples? Here are the obvious ones everyone has seen but few confront: • Influencers and NGOs who publicly switch sides the moment it’s inconvenient. They vanish when banned, reappear when reinstated, and then pretend nothing happened. Nobody calls them out.
• Media outlets,  including Israeli outlets, continuing to use terms that dehumanize Israeli citizens and feed international biases. Language matters. The wrong label converts defense into occupation in the court of global opinion.
• Duplicate campaigns and fundraising drives that cannibalize each other’s audiences instead of pooling lists and amplifying what actually works. The result: tired donors, bloated overhead, and no strategic muscle.
• The alarming absence of mutual aid when one of us is targeted. A friend lost his LinkedIn business lifeline and the response was silence. That silence speaks louder than any op-ed.

What’s the cause? A mixture of short-termism and ego. Too many people treat advocacy as personal clout building instead of a shared moral mission. Too many organizations chase branding and events instead of building infrastructure for the long game: legal pushback against biased platforms, rapid-response communications teams, centralized fact-checking hubs, and a shared events calendar so activists don’t compete for attention but coordinate for impact.

So here is the hard message: if we want Israel to be strong and invincible in the court of world opinion, we must stop being unserious children fighting for the spotlight. That means concrete, sometimes boring, work:

1. Create a shared digital war room, a secure coalition calendar and rapid-response list for bans, doxxing, and misinformation. When one of us is attacked, we all push.
2. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Merge overlapping campaigns. Pool mailing lists. Share donor data (with consent) so we fund what actually moves the needle.
3. Train spokespeople and grassroots activists in media literacy and factual debate. Stop giving interviews to outlets that mislabel Israeli towns and people without preparation to correct them immediately.
4. Coordinate legal and PR aid for those deplatformed. Make it standard practice: if you get reinstated after a ban, you’re obliged to help the next person who is silenced.
5. Call out bad actors publicly, even when it’s uncomfortable. Pretending nobody behaved selfishly only gives permission for the behavior to continue.

Make no mistake: this is not about purity tests. This is about survival. Israel’s enemies count on our fragmentation. They know that a scattered, self-centered movement is an easy target for delegitimization. They fund narratives, train media operatives, and weaponize bureaucratic policies at social platforms. Our biggest advantage,  truth backed by moral clarity,  will be squandered if we don’t act like a movement, not a million competing influencers.

We can be tougher and kinder at once. Tougher because we refuse to accept weak excuses and polished PR theater. Kinder because solidarity means stepping up for each other when it’s hard, not when it’s profitable. If you want Israel to be invincible, start by being invincible for each other: share the lists, share the stage, share the burden. Fight the mob, not your neighbor. Use your brains, only once, as the saying goes and choose the long game over the short applause.

The survival of a nation is too important to be ruined by small minds with big brands. If we don’t fix this, we will lose not because we lacked courage, but because we forgot how to be human together.

About Time To Stand Up for Israel

Time To Stand Up for Israel is an independent foundation dedicated to fighting misinformation, countering antisemitism, and providing clear, fact-based education about Israel. We do not engage in internal Israeli politics. We stand on two core principles: Israel has the right to exist. Israel has the duty to defend itself. Support our work: Donate and/or subscribe at: www.timetostandupforisrael.com