During a trip to the United States when he met then-President George W. Bush on May 23, 2006, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister at the time, outlined a plan of his. The ideas he presented were a continuation of sorts of the disengagement that ended Israel’s presence in the Gaza Strip. He termed it a “process of free alignment [that] would reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians … and guarantee Israel’s security as a Jewish state.”

Why would a politician from a Revisionist family—a member of Betar—adopt such a political position? What was his thinking?

Seymour D. Reich, the president of the left-wing Israel Policy Forum, attested in The New York Times on July 6, 2005, as to the mindset of Olmert. A month earlier, in speaking in New York, Olmert had declared: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies. We want to be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.”

Reich elucidated over a year later in The Jerusalem Post, that Olmert had also added: “We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors, and I believe that this is not impossible … it is within reach if we will be smart, if we will dare, if we will be prepared to take the risks, and if we will be able to convince our Palestinian partners to be able to do the same.”

On July 12, 2006, Israel was at war with Lebanon under what proved to be the inadequate leadership of Olmert, who was excoriated by the Winograd Commission.

As should be quite evident, being tired is a poor substitute for the resolve required by Jews to live in Israel, to confront its enemies—from without and also from within.

The demonstrations generated by IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace in various cities, their blocking of the White House, and on Oct. 17, the sit-in of some 200 in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, are another indication of tiredness.

They were dressed in black T-shirts carrying the slogan “Jews say ceasefire now” and “Not in our name.” Even though not all were Jewish (in today’s atmosphere of “identity politics” no conversion process of any form is a requirement), they were the result of a tired American Jewish leadership of the past quarter century.

At that rally, Eva Borgwardt, national spokesperson for IfNotNow (a former J Streeter and an aide to Israeli Arab Communist Knesset member Aida Touma-Sliman) said in an INN newsletter that “historical Jewish trauma [is] being used as a weapon to carry out a genocide” and that Israel “bombing an entire people.” It is not only shocking the untruths and false narratives she and her comrades spout but the sheer audacity to do it with the knowledge that her audience is primed to imbibe her bile.

As a Wall Street Journal commentary by Steven Davidoff Solomon on Oct. 15 observed, anti-Israel conduct such as the various declarations by student bodies at Harvard University, New York University and the University of California, Berkeley with Jews being prominent signatories “is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre [along the Gaza Strip] possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.”

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Solomon added that “it’s time for the adults to take over.”

However, I fear that the current Jewish officialdom has displayed a tired attitude for too long, and outside, independent intervention is necessary, as well as a complete shake-up of those dealing with the younger generation. Of course, there are exceptions, like in Vermont and Harvard. These, however, are too tardy responses.

Pro-Palestine activists have infiltrated Jewish student bodies. I was part of an effort several years ago to awaken establishment apparatchiks to the dangers but to no avail. True, we have witnessed in the past Jewish students siding with the Palestinian struggle—the 1967 SNCC statement, Breira and others over the years. But what appears to be ominous, besides the mindlessness in their slogans, is that they are not just in a position of disagreement with their fellow Jews or even that they have adopted the positions of Israel’s enemies. What is harrowing is that they are expressing themselves with animosity, callousness and even hate. Jewish students are deemed as requiring armed protection.

Those Jews who are leading and pushing and those justifying this anti-Zionism took their cue from an Israeli prime minister who was tired, and too many of today’s young Jewish generation find themselves battered and unsupported. School curricula are subverted to favor anti-Zionism in the high schools, and even in the lower grades in accordance with the ethnic-studies framework and critical race theory. And, more importantly, without the education and the belief in the justness of Zionism.

They are the fruits of those who were tired over the past quarter of a century. Zombie-like, they follow professors and rabbis who have lost direction and who seek favor with colleagues. And the more they display weakness and fear, the bolder the enemies of Israel in the progressive woke camp become. They parrot such terms as “apartheid,” “genocide” and other vacuous catchphrases.

And they are more than just tired souls. They possess empty and immoral souls. On a recent MSNBC panel, on Oct. 10, far-left journalist Peter Beinart nonchalantly declared (at 7:10) that Palestinian organizations “do terrible things, too, because brutalized people do brutal things sometimes.” Israel left Gaza in 2005, some 18 years ago. Hamas won the 2006 elections and mobilized a subjugated population to produce 1,500 shock troops that slaughtered, mutilated, raped and burned hundreds of Jews on Simchat Torah.

That wasn’t brutality. It was a fiendish, animalistic and satanic act of barbarism—an inhuman onslaught. Incredibly, in part, Beinart whitewashed it by portraying Israel through the prism of his warped anti-Zionism. Perhaps he sees himself as a new “Abraham,” but unlike the biblical figure, he is willing to sacrifice his Isaac and for all the wrong reasons.

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A new voice must arise—a voice that boldly, even proudly, declares that Jews are not tired. That they are resilient and will re-establish Jewish pride, Jewish identity and the promise of a Jewish future. A voice of the true Jewish soul.