Israeli politics is driving out its mensches, and the country will pay the price - comment

Small talk, the kind of question you ask a minister and expect a minister’s answer.

His son, an officer in the Paratroopers, had been wounded in Gaza. And Sofer himself has carried Joseph’s Tomb since 1996, when he was severely wounded there, a trauma he barely mentioned in public for more than two decades.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of politicians. Most of them say they feel the nation’s pain, and some even mean it. Sofer wasn’t performing empathy for me; there was no camera rolling yet and nothing to gain.

He was just telling another Jew, wired up in the chair next to him, that it hurts. And then, when the cameras did roll, I watched him do something harder: measure every sentence so it wouldn’t add to the noise.

No jab at a rival, no line engineered to trend. In today’s politics, that kind of self-restraint is a full-time job, and he was doing it while barely holding himself together.

His statement isn’t really a farewell, so it’s worth paying attention to the details. Israel must build an iron wall, he wrote, but one that rests on spirit, values, and unity.

Citizens must demand a discourse of solidarity and true partnership. A man who is leaving quietly doesn’t repeat the word “achdut, (unity),” like that. He is telling us why he’s leaving.

The immediate background behind Sofer’s decision is his fight with his own party chairman, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, over the draft law. Sofer didn’t hide where he stood.

In February, he called himself the biggest opponent of the bill in its current form and said he saw no real intention to draft haredim (ultra-Orthodox), adding that he had put a foot in the door knowing what it might cost. It cost him everything.

Consider this: a wounded combat officer, whose family is currently bearing the heavy toll of this war, found it impossible to remain in the Religious Zionist Party because he believed that the responsibility of defending Israel should be a shared one.

I wish this were one man’s story.

In May, MK Moshe Arbel resigned from the Knesset. The former interior and health minister, a man even his rivals describe as serious and decent, ended his letter with a prayer that the Knesset would banish baseless hatred from within us, “that we should respect one another and be moderate toward each other.”

Edelstein had already been stripped of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairmanship for refusing to advance the exemption law, and when asked why he was leaving, he said he could no longer stand on a stage and tell people to vote for Likud: “I don’t know how to finish the sentence.”

And National Unity chairman Benny Gantz, who walked into an emergency government in October 2023 when it was politically suicidal, now polls below the electoral threshold, week after week.

Different men, different parties, different reasons on paper.

But I keep seeing the same person: someone who understood being elected as a job serving the whole people of Israel, not a base. Someone who spoke about unity when unity was unfashionable inside his own camp.

Sofer called publicly for a unity government in February 2024, at the height of the war, and said the moment demanded mutual responsibility that was, in his words, far from any election poll.

His political world treated it as a curiosity. He was ahead of his time by exactly the amount of time it takes a country to forget October 7.

Even Sofer’s position on the judicial reform told you who he was. He supported much of the substance and was pained by the way it was done: too aggressive, too in-your-face, deaf to complexity.

In a healthy political environment, that would be seen as discernment. In our context, it often appears as vulnerability.

Here’s what makes me angriest. Sofer wasn’t a weak minister. Go look at the numbers. Western aliyah jumped from 21% of all immigrants to 38% in one year.

His credentials reform means that a doctor or lawyer who lands at Ben-Gurion Airport can work in their profession almost immediately; 541 physicians arrived through his program in 2025 alone, into a health system starving for them.

Sofer pushed through the decision to bring the entire Bnei Menashe community home. Tens of thousands of Jews chose Israel, in his words, “davka now, precisely now,” and he built his ministry to receive them.

He quietly constructed the infrastructure for the great post-October 7 Jewish reshuffling. He leaves now just as it starts working.

Also, the voters may understand something the parties do not. The moderates aren’t disappearing from the electorate; they’re being pushed out of the parties. Edelstein is not retiring; he’s building something new.

So apparently are a few others. Where they settle is a question for the months ahead. What’s already answered is what the existing political homes do to people like them.

Sofer wrote that the wounds of this war will leave scars that won’t heal quickly and that they should remind us daily of our responsibility to choose the right path. I keep thinking about that studio, about a man carrying his own pain and everyone else’s in the same body, still choosing his words carefully so as not to add to ours.

We created a system that discourages such behavior. Ofir Sofer will be okay; individuals like him always find ways to contribute. The real concern is what occurs for the rest of us when, one by one, the good people choose to leave, leaving only chaos behind.