Communications consultant Ronen Tzur said Wednesday that he was dropping out of the Democratic Party primaries ahead of the next Knesset, and on Thursday he explained the decision in an interview with 103FM. He accused the party of drifting far from the political home he expected, saying it had become far more extreme than an alliance between Labor and Meretz was supposed to be.
Tzur said the immediate trigger was a recent anonymous text-message campaign sent to party members, in which two primary candidates, Yaia Pink and Nimrod Sheffer, both associated with the party’s dovish camp, were smeared. At first, suspicion fell on Tzur, but it later emerged that the messages were sent from Sheffer’s own campaign headquarters.
He said the affair convinced him he could not remain in the party. “When I see the smear campaign, the lynching and the blood libel concocted by Nimrod Sheffer under a mask of innocence and purity, to defend a meeting with Jibril Rajoub, who justifies the October 7 massacre, I understood this is not my political home,” Tzur said. He also condemned what he called the “cunning” of sending messages that appeared to come from him and portrayed Sheffer and his team as flattering supporters of the massacre.
Tzur also criticized the party leadership, especially chairman Yair Golan, for not responding forcefully enough. “I waited for a call from Yair Golan saying this is intolerable and unforgivable,” he said, adding that if the roles were reversed, he would have been immediately suspended. He said the “shocking silence” of Golan and others, along with the internal atmosphere of the party, helped drive his decision to quit. Tzur said he had hoped a leader would embrace pluralism, but instead he saw what he described as a “murderous” character assassination campaign after a meeting with Golan.
