Edward Topol | HOW LONG WILL WE SURVIVE?

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the results of our protracted war with Hamas are clear. Instead of having one minor gory enemy, we now have two dozen hostile governments of major countries. A tough question arises: What is the point of the Zionist project? So that outcasts scattered around the world can create a rogue state?

The other day, I heard on the radio that the Chief of Staff of the IDF said that today the IDF had entered a new reality and was moving to an offensive strategy involving joint action by land, sea, and air forces. I was struck by this statement. Not because this happened to the IDF only at the end of the third year of a creeping war with Hamas, but because the IDF’s new reality is that of the last century, when the outcome of war was decided by soldiers, tanks, and planes. Meanwhile, it’s clear that the tiny, toxic Gaza Strip has formed a powerful international anti-Israel alliance of states that supply it with food, finances, and moral support while taking weapons away from Israel—and all without any tanks or planes.

It is not for me to lecture Israeli generals, especially since I have heard that the IDF used AI in the 12-day war with Iran. However, even if all our drones, tanks, and aircraft are equipped with AI, this does not guarantee victory in the new 21st-century reality. Today, social media moguls like Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk can easily transform a military victory into a political defeat on a whim. This results in immediate economic losses in the form of sanctions and boycotts of our goods, as well as human losses on the battlefield.

With deep regret, I must report that the catastrophe known as “October 7” did not end in October 2023. On the front lines of the information war, we are as defenseless today as the kibbutz residents were on that terrible morning. In this regard, we don’t even have a fence yet, let alone a barrier!

How has it come to pass that while we sell high-tech startups worth billions of dollars abroad, we lack our own pro-Semitic TikTok, Telegram, and Instagram capable of countering anti-Israeli slander? By entrusting the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with fighting global anti-Israel sentiment, the government washed its hands of the matter, demonstrating its misunderstanding of 21st-century realities. Meanwhile, as Ivan Krylov and before him La Fontaine and Aesop warned, “It is a disaster when a shoemaker starts baking pies and a baker starts making shoes.” This is precisely the trouble we see today. With all due respect to Mr. Gideon Saar, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ main task is quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy, not loud battles with Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and TikTok.

At the same time, I am not advocating for the immediate creation of a propaganda ministry. In Israel, ministers are the political overseers of areas they don’t have time to understand because they’re shuffled every six months like cards in a casino dealer’s hands. I am also not advocating for the creation of the Information Influence Agency in this article, even though it is an urgently needed tool for combating the world media’s slander of Israel. Led by a professional manager, it still would not be able to cope with the tsunami of vicious anti-Semitism engulfing all of world Jewry.

I am talking about the urgent need for a broader, radical, global approach to the historical challenge now facing Jews. We need to realize that it was in the 20th century that the Holocaust ended with the death of Hitler and the defeat of Germany. The new Holocaust that began on October 7, 2023, will not end with the elimination of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar and will not end with Hamas’s defeat. In fact, the final defeat of Hamas could trigger a series of mass pogroms against Jews in Europe, which is already infected by aggressive Islam.

It is customary to criticize those who predict tragic events, but even considering this prospect, I must say: Gentlemen Jews, brothers and sisters, do not expect the global conflagration of anti-Semitism that began in the Gaza Strip to die down on its own, nor should you expect the world to calm down as it did after the conflicts in Kosovo and Nagorno-Karabakh. The Islamic world and the Axis of Evil have only just begun to pour pro-Palestinian fuel into the furnace of global anti-Semitism.

We are at a critical juncture in world history. Just as the novel coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, China, and spread across the globe, the evil genie of anti-Semitism burst out of the temporarily plugged abscess of terrorism in Gaza on October 7, 2023. No IDF, with all our ground, sea, and air forces, can drive it back.

Unfortunately, I am not Einstein, Niels Bohr, or even Copperfield. I can’t provide you with the formula for an information mega-bomb or the blueprint for an anti-Semitic fire extinguisher. However, I believe the Almighty or the Higher Mind gave us the opportunity to have our own state so that, at a decisive moment in history, we would recognize the problem before our haters raise and unleash the Dead Sea of their hatred upon us.

In plain language, I want to say that today, there is no longer a division between Israeli and diaspora Jewry. During the looming pogroms from Europe to the Middle and Far East, the pogromists won’t ask what country’s passport you have in your pocket. We must urgently pool our resources and organizational talents to create a new platform that promotes pro-Semitism and pro-Jewish values — a pro-Jewish TikTok, Grok, Twitter, and Internet TV Israel Today, all in one!

This is not a task for lone volunteers. The State of Israel and its government have a historical mission to rise to the challenge of solving this problem by calling upon brilliant IT and AI specialists from around the world, including the US, Canada, Israel, Russia, and Belarus.

Humanity has suffered from anti-Semitism for nearly 2,000 years, since the Alexandria pogrom in 38 CE. If the development of civilization has led to cures for diseases such as the plague, anthrax, smallpox, polio, and rabies, then shouldn’t we find a cure for anti-Semitism? How is this infection different from rabies?

Listen, Jews. I’m not being sarcastic or smart-alecky. The atomic bomb that ended WWII and postponed WWIII cost Roosevelt a billion dollars. We have a state called Israel with a multi-billion, Baruch Hashem, budget, we have the World Zionist Organization, the American Jewish Congress, the European Jewish Congress, the Eurasian Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, HIAS, the United Jewish Appeal, the Jewish Federation of Canada, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, and several hundred Jewish billionaires.

I know what a pogrom is. I experienced my first one as a teenager in Poltava, Ukraine, in March of 1953. Only Stalin’s miraculous death stopped the pogromists a hundred yards from our house. However, they managed to write in oil paint on our neighbors’ porch: “JEWS! WE WILL PAINT THE ROOFS WITH YOUR BLOOD!” The second pogrom took place fifty miles away from me in Lod in May 2021. The third took place on October 7, 2023, on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, not far away.

In Israel, however, I am protected from rioters and terrorists by the IDF, the Israeli army. Who will protect European, Canadian, and Australian Jews from them? What about the Jews of New York when Donald Trump leaves the White House and Zohran Mamdani, an Islamist, becomes mayor?

I appeal to Benjamin Netanyahu, Natan Sharansky, and Noa Argamani. Can you ask the most influential Jews in tech – Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer and Jan Koum – why God gave them their talents and billions? Was it so they could sail on superyachts and hang Picasso in their offices and Chagall in their bedrooms? Why can’t they and other Jewish billionaires create a fund for Manhattan Project 2.0 to find a cure for anti-Semitism? Are the combined talents of the creators of Google, Facebook, Oracle, WhatsApp, and other 21st-century wonders not enough to save their descendants and all Jews from new holocausts or complete extermination?

After all, not everyone in the world is afflicted with the leprosy of anti-Semitism. I would say that only part of the world is incurably malicious. Another part has caught the virus but is curable. The rest are not exactly healthy but rather cowardly neutral. While at least some of the world is on our side—evangelicals, for example—can Jewish minds invent a way to end anti-Semitism, just as cannibalism and the bubonic plague were ended?

It’s time for us Jews to stop merely surviving and start living!

Otherwise, why are we living on this earth?

Edward Topol is an Author of International Bestsellers Red Square, Submarine U-147, Red Snow, and the new books Criminal Kremlin: From Lenin to Putin: 57 Kremlin Murders and Operation Frantic Joe