Liberal peace initiatives and even “woke” ideals are familiar concepts to me. Born in Euclid, Ohio and ordained as an ELCA Lutheran minister, I’m also a member of an Episcopal church in New Hampshire. Additionally—having lived in Israel—I feel I can bring a unique perspective on why Western left ideologies do not jibe with the realities of Israeli life on the ground.

Political experts try to explain why the Israeli center-left keeps losing ahead of the October 2026 elections. They blame poor marketing, a divided electorate, or Netanyahu’s staying power. They are blind to a deeper cultural reality. The center-left loses for one simple reason: it keeps forcing a Western peace framework onto a Middle East that runs on a different survival code.

The Elite’s Institutional Shield

One of the first major shocks for a Western outsider—who assumes Israel mirrors a standard Western democracy—is the structure of Israel’s Supreme Court. By contrast, Jewish families who fled Arab lands after 1948, see the court as a closed, exclusive, and fundamentally unelected body. Under long-standing rules of the Judicial Selection Committee, a majority of seven out of nine members is required to appoint Supreme Court justices. This arrangement gives sitting justices a vote and a veto over their own successors. To a Westerner? This is undemocratic. To Jewish refugees? This is unfair.

The old European establishment—now the center-left—uses the system as a personal shield. This moderate liberal group elevates high-tech economics and the court system as symbols of an “enlightened” Israel. In local political culture, ha-ne’orim—“the enlightened”—is a self-appointed label the secular establishment uses to frame itself as the rational defender of Western values.

By framing modern Israeli politics as a contest between their own “enlightened” class and the right-wing majority, the Ashkenazi center-left still leans on a deeply rooted disdain for the Mizrahi working class. In “enlightened” vocabulary, traditional families living in border towns are dismissed with slurs like chachchachim (the uncultured) or asafsuf—the unthinking mob. Treating them as primitive people repeats the historical insult that originally drove Mizrahi voters away from the left and into the Likud party in 1977.

The same disconnect appears today as a vocabulary gap that leaves the center-left sounding detached from reality.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)