Yuli Edelstein has spent much of his life saying no to powerful institutions. He said no to a Soviet system that tried to decide how much Jewish memory a person was allowed to carry. Now, decades later, he is saying no to his own political home.

Edelstein recently announced that he could no longer remain in Likud under its current course. He said he could not keep campaigning for a party that continues to support large-scale draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men. If he won a place on the list, he explained, he would have to stand before voters and say, “Vote Likud, we will…” — and he no longer knew how to finish the sentence. What, exactly, would he be promising? A continuation of what he bluntly called “freeloading”?

That is not the language of a man making a tactical adjustment. It is the language of a man who has reached the edge of what he can honestly defend.

Edelstein apologized to longtime Likud supporters, but said there was no other way. Then he added the sentence that, to me, reveals the continuity between his past and his present: “The State of Israel has always come before my party.” For a man with his story, that is not a line tested on a focus group. It is a refusenik’s sentence.

A refusenik understands what happens when institutions demand loyalty without conscience. He understands the danger of repeating what one no longer believes. That is why Edelstein’s decision matters. To understand how much, it helps to remember who is speaking — and I had the unearned good fortune to hear that voice in person once.

I had not come to the Knesset that day to meet Yuli Edelstein. It was November 2017, and I had come as a father, to introduce my youngest son, then seven years old, to Prime Minister Netanyahu. While we were there, my host offered something unplanned, almost in passing: would we like to meet the Speaker of the Knesset? I knew Edelstein then only by reputation, as one of the most famous refuseniks ever to make it to Israel.

I did not expect that unscheduled meeting to be the one I would still be carrying nine years later.

His office held the quiet weight of Israeli democracy: wood-paneled walls, framed history, a portrait of Herzl gazing past us, Jerusalem light through the window, and the awareness that decisions made in that building can alter the fate of a people. But the conversation did not feel merely political. It felt historical.

Before he was a minister, before he became Speaker, before he became one of the most recognizable figures in Israeli public life, Yuli Edelstein was a Soviet Jewish refusenik. That history was not background. It was the foundation.

What he shared that day was not a campaign biography. It was a memory of Jewish life under a system designed to make Jewish continuity difficult, dangerous, and humiliating — a world in which Jewish........

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