Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “For Hezbollah – a Tough Hand; for Our Brothers – a Soft Heart”

The Jerusalem Post just reported that Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan has asked Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the UN Security Council “condemn the Hezbollah drone operation targeting the Karish gas rig in Israel’s territorial waters last week.” While the drones were shut down before they could do any damage, Erdan insisted that the attack “may lead to an escalation in the region and [therefore] the international community must sharply condemn it.”

In my opinion, any condemnation, however strong, will accomplish nothing. Hezbollah has proven time and again that the only language it understands is that of power. Therefore, we should retaliate with deadly force, with missiles aimed not at the drones, but at the places that send them. At the same time, we must enhance our solidarity and cohesion. Only such a two-way movement will solve our security problems.

When I speak of firing missiles, I do not mean exchanging fire, as it happened previously. I mean making them realize that we have had enough, and we are not willing to tolerate their aggression any longer. We have enough conventional military options to make sure this happens, and we should use all of them and not take anyone’s opinion into consideration, just as no other country would hesitate to use all its power against an aggressor who has declared his intention to wipe out the defending country and has repeatedly tried to do so.

On the military level, our problem is not Hezbollah, but our own hesitance against it. Hezbollah has declared war on Israel, not the other way around, so why are we not treating it like an enemy that has declared war on us and says explicitly that it will not rest until we are gone? Why are we not destroying it? Would any other country avoid doing so?

At the same time, we must not neglect our inner fortitude, which comes from our cohesion. This is the key factor in our struggle. When it comes to solidarity, we are our only enemy. Internal division within the people of Israel has always been our biggest woe and our only real enemy, since as long as we are united, no one challenges us.

Currently, our hearts are soft toward our enemies, and tough toward each other. Unless we reverse the direction of our hearts, we will continue to suffer blows and our enemies will grow stronger and more brazen.

Internal unity, therefore, based on solidarity and cohesion within our nation, is our “ultimate weapon,” not because it destroys our enemies, but because it destroys their enmity. If we act decisively on both fronts, military and social, we will succeed and the world will support us. If we neglect either, we will not succeed and the world will condemn us, as it does today, and Hezbollah will keep winning.
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My new article on Linkedin “Europe Supports Terrorism against Israel”

Less than a year ago, Israel presented evidence that the Palestinian organization Al-Haq is a terror supporting organization. As a result, the European Union cut off funding to the organization. A week ago, the EU suddenly announced that it had found no evidence to support Israel’s argument and announced that it would resume funding. Shortly after, nine European countries issued a joint statement that they, too, will resume funding of Al-Haq and other organizations that support Palestinian terrorism against Israel, claiming that Israel had presented no evidence to support its claim.

At the same time, the Israeli organization NGO Monitor said that it did provide European governments ample proof that these organizations finance or otherwise support terrorist activities. The organization decried the countries’ “deliberate ignoring of materials presented to them for years.”

I have no doubt that the organizations that Israel pointed out do support terrorists and terrorism. However, I am just as confident that trying to get the EU or its countries to stop funding them is utterly pointless. The simple truth is that the EU, as an organization, and the member states of the EU, support these Palestinian organizations because they, too, want to revoke the State of Israel.

We can complain to them and we can protest, but as long as we do not advance the one thing we must advance—our internal cohesion—and present it to the world as an example of unity, we will not see any favorable approach toward Israel.

Currently we are setting an example of division. Accordingly, the entire world is uniting against us and with our enemies.

If we are divided, the world wants not only to revoke Israel, but to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. There is no in-between here; it is either or.

By “unity,” I am not referring to unity with Israel’s enemies against adversaries from our own folk. This does not show the world that we are united, but rather emphasizes our division and increases the world’s hatred toward us. By “unity,” I mean uniting with our own people despite the chasm of views between us, and without erasing it, so as to show what we are overcoming. This will give the nations the example they need in order to begin to unite among themselves, and they will thank us for it.

We need not be afraid of criticism. We must be confident that all we need is to be a light to the nations—an example of solidarity, mutual responsibility and love of others. If we do this, the world will cherish us and thank us.

The world unites with us when we unite with one another, and unites against us when we turn against each other, as is happening now. Our success, therefore, depends entirely on the connection between us. If we nurture our unity, we will thrive. If we do not, the world will see our existence as redundant and disruptive, and will seek to do away with us.

Through the connection between us, we determine where the world’s forces will go. When we are united, the world directs its energy toward connection and everyone enjoys the benefits of unity. When we are divided, the forces of the world turn against each other, wars and destruction ensue, and the whole world blames us for it. This is the simple equation of our lives.

For more on the link between Jewish unity and antisemitism, read my publications The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord, and Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why unity and mutual guarantee are today’s call of the hour.
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My new article on Linkedin “Neither Biden nor Obama or Any Other Leader – There Is Only One Superpower”

Contrary to the hype surrounding the landing of Air Force One with President Joe Biden on board, I am not excited about his arrival in Israel. I never had any faith in him, much less in Obama, and the same is true of any world leader. However they perceive their leadership, I know their hearts are governed by the same singular power that exists in the world: the power of connection.

Because Israel feels dependent on the United States for its security, there is some concern that the evident decline in US global power and dominance will have a negative impact on Israel’s position in the world. In my opinion, this is the wrong approach. We are Israel, the nation that coined the terms “mutual responsibility” and “solidarity”; we owe our strength to our unity, and to nothing else. When we are together, we are invincible. No one will defeat us when we are united because no one will want to fight against us. On the contrary, everyone will root for us as long as we root for each other.

While the leaders of Israel and the United States are making their statement during the official reception at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel-Aviv, reaffirming their mutual commitment to Israel’s security and to the collaboration they intend to deepen, I know that there is only one thing to which Israelis must commit: to one another. There is only one superpower in the world: the superpower of connection.

When the Jewish people first united into a nation, their only adhesive was faith in unity. But with it, they had achieved all that they had achieved. When a nation is united, they learned, nothing can overcome it and no mountain is too high.

Therefore, I place my faith in our unity. If we restore the solidarity and mutual responsibility that our ancestors had cultivated among them, we will achieve greatness. Our economy will thrive, our enemies will disappear, and the world will want to learn from our example. It will be just as it was in the days of the Second Temple, before the conflicts tore us apart. In those days, writes the book Sifrei Devarim, people from other nations would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

As then, so now, if we want to achieve greatness, we should not look to foreign leaders to assist us; we should open our hearts to one another and let the superpower of unity prevail.
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My new article on Linkedin “For Hezbollah – a Tough Hand; for Our Brothers – a Soft Heart”

The Jerusalem Post just reported that Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan has asked Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the UN Security Council “condemn the Hezbollah drone operation targeting the Karish gas rig in Israel’s territorial waters last week.” While the drones were shut down before they could do any damage, Erdan insisted that the attack “may lead to an escalation in the region and [therefore] the international community must sharply condemn it.”

In my opinion, any condemnation, however strong, will accomplish nothing. Hezbollah has proven time and again that the only language it understands is that of power. Therefore, we should retaliate with deadly force, with missiles aimed not at the drones, but at the places that send them. At the same time, we must enhance our solidarity and cohesion. Only such a two-way movement will solve our security problems.

When I speak of firing missiles, I do not mean exchanging fire, as it happened previously. I mean making them realize that we have had enough, and we are not willing to tolerate their aggression any longer. We have enough conventional military options to make sure this happens, and we should use all of them and not take anyone’s opinion into consideration, just as no other country would hesitate to use all its power against an aggressor who has declared his intention to wipe out the defending country and has repeatedly tried to do so.

On the military level, our problem is not Hezbollah, but our own hesitance against it. Hezbollah has declared war on Israel, not the other way around, so why are we not treating it like an enemy that has declared war on us and says explicitly that it will not rest until we are gone? Why are we not destroying it? Would any other country avoid doing so?

At the same time, we must not neglect our inner fortitude, which comes from our cohesion. This is the key factor in our struggle. When it comes to solidarity, we are our only enemy. Internal division within the people of Israel has always been our biggest woe and our only real enemy, since as long as we are united, no one challenges us.

Currently, our hearts are soft toward our enemies, and tough toward each other. Unless we reverse the direction of our hearts, we will continue to suffer blows and our enemies will grow stronger and more brazen.

Internal unity, therefore, based on solidarity and cohesion within our nation, is our “ultimate weapon,” not because it destroys our enemies, but because it destroys their enmity. If we act decisively on both fronts, military and social, we will succeed and the world will support us. If we neglect either, we will not succeed and the world will condemn us, as it does today, and Hezbollah will keep winning.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Curse of Re-elections”

“As long as the laws of society are not satisfactory to each and every individual in the state, and ‎leave a minority that is dissatisfied with the government of the state, that minority conspires ‎under the government of the state and seeks to overthrow it,” wrote Baal HaSulam back in the 1930s in his essay, “Peace in the World.” To this he added that if the power of the losing faction “is not sufficient to fight the government of the state face to face, it will seek to ‎overthrow it indirectly, such as by inciting countries against each other and bringing them to ‎war, for it is natural that at wartime there will be many more dissatisfied people with whom they ‎will have hope to achieve the critical mass to overthrow the government of the state and ‎establish a new leadership that is convenient for them.”

It seems as though these words were written yesterday, not ninety years ago. What is worse, the pertinence of Baal HaSulam’s words proves that we have not learned much.

We established the Jewish state based on laws we borrowed from the British Mandate that ruled here before us, with some leftovers from the rules of the Ottoman Empire that ruled here before the British. These are not the laws of the Israeli nation, but laws of the nations of the world. This incongruity wore down the legitimacy of the judicial structure to such an extent that lawmakers and laypeople alike are leaning increasingly toward following their own interpretations of the law.

Without a common goal and a collectively adopted constitution, we will never have a stable government and a solid Jewish state. Our common law should be the law that was the basis of Jewish peoplehood: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Even when the people of Israel could not practice it, they always strove for it. If they do not, they are not regarded as Israel.

Currently, because no effort, or even aspiration to unite exists within the people of Israel living in the State of Israel, we are not Israel. What are we then? We are a collective of persecuted migrants and refugees, many of whom feel that the country they live in does not belong to them and dream of the moment they can return to the country from which they or their parents were chased away.

Herzl’s vision of forming a safe haven for Jews is not enough. If this is the only reason for our gathering here, we will not be able to form a cohesive and stable society. The obstinate, opinionated nature of our people will soon take over, and division and hostility will develop. This is what is happening to Israel today. As a result, the political parties have splintered and become fragmented, and a succession of elections ensued.

If we want to stabilize the Israeli society and prevent its disintegration, we need to fall in line behind a single goal that we value more than our own opinion. Also, the goal of our country should not be to save the Jews, but to save the world from division and conflict.

The reason Israel is always at the center of attention, especially in times of conflict, is that the world looks to Israel for example. Since the inception of our people, we have been tasked with serving as a model of unity. Our ancestors assembled from numerous tribes, clans, and countries, and pledged to love each other more than themselves. This is unheard of by today’s ostensibly civilized standards. In the ancient world, this was utterly inconceivable.

Nevertheless, our ancestors attempted it and succeeded. Moreover, they proved that when they unite, they triumph and overpower any nation that challenges them. They proved that military and economic success depend, in the case of the people of Israel, solely on their unity.

Alternatively, when they became divided and hostile toward each other, they demonstrated weakness, and foreign nations overpowered them and exiled them. Our unique nation, therefore, became the first nation that could choose its own fate. When it chose unity, it succeeded; when it chose division, it failed. In a sense, our nation was a proof of concept, a “pilot,” as historian Paul Johnson called us. We proved that foreigners can bond in peace and love if they value unity more than their own culture and tradition.

The modern-day curse of endless elections reflects a decline in the level of the unity of our people in the State of Israel. Instead of lining up around the tenet of unity above all other considerations, each party promotes its own agenda and claims that it will lead Israel to success. Yet, they are all wrong because if their ideas do not require national unity as a precondition, it makes no difference what agenda they support; it is condemned to failure.

Only when we realize our unity, above all differences, will the curse of perpetual elections be removed. Moreover, only when we realize this will the danger of another cataclysm to the Jewish people be averted, as Israel becomes what Israel is meant to be: “a light [of unity] to the nations.”

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Israelis Need Only One Passport”

There is a strange phenomenon that is probably unique to Israelis, or perhaps to Jews: purchasing an alternative citizenship. For some years, it was possible to legally purchase a Portuguese citizenship and get an EU passport, if you met certain conditions related to your ancestry. Now, a similar deal is being offered to people with roots in Germany. I can understand why after two millennia of persecution, Israelis are inclined to secure an alternative location in case trouble finds them here. However, I believe, and history is my witness, that hiding will not help us escape trouble. Our only protection is internal unity. No one has ever defeated, or even challenged us when we were united.

Therefore, I am not looking to buy an alternative passport or prepare a safe haven for myself, even though I have family outside of Israel. Instead, I am trying to do what I think I, and all the Israelis should do.

The more chaotic the world becomes, and it is quickly becoming very chaotic, the more the Jews will be accused of causing it. It is not because we are deliberately causing chaos, but because we are not setting an example of unity, we are blamed for the world’s inability to establish cohesive societies.

The reason for the global rise in antisemitism is not Israel’s negative conduct toward our neighbors, even though this is the world’s grievance against Israel. The real, albeit elusive reason for the intensifying antisemitism is the worsening division in the world, which it pins on Israel.

There is a simple reason for this: Whenever there is division, it is blamed on the Jews since our role is to set an example of solidarity and mutual responsibility, the tenets around which our nation was born, and the values we were tasked with exemplifying. Therefore, if Israel fails to fulfill its calling, the world condemns it.

In other words, the world hates us not for our actions, but for our inaction, for our refusal to practice and display internal unity. As long as we do not strive for solidarity and cohesion, we will not find peace or security anywhere, not in Israel, not in Europe, not in America, and not in Africa. Wherever we go, people will blame us for their wars and for their woes.

Our only safety net, therefore, is our unity. When we are united, we pacify the world’s wars and win humanity’s gratitude and favor. When we are divided, wars and conflicts ensue, and the world hates us for it and seeks to punish us.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Curse of Re-elections”

“As long as the laws of society are not satisfactory to each and every individual in the state, and ‎leave a minority that is dissatisfied with the government of the state, that minority conspires ‎under the government of the state and seeks to overthrow it,” wrote Baal HaSulam back in the 1930s in his essay, “Peace in the World.” To this he added that if the power of the losing faction “is not sufficient to fight the government of the state face to face, it will seek to ‎overthrow it indirectly, such as by inciting countries against each other and bringing them to ‎war, for it is natural that at wartime there will be many more dissatisfied people with whom they ‎will have hope to achieve the critical mass to overthrow the government of the state and ‎establish a new leadership that is convenient for them.”

It seems as though these words were written yesterday, not ninety years ago. What is worse, the pertinence of Baal HaSulam’s words proves that we have not learned much.

We established the Jewish state based on laws we borrowed from the British Mandate that ruled here before us, with some leftovers from the rules of the Ottoman Empire that ruled here before the British. These are not the laws of the Israeli nation, but laws of the nations of the world. This incongruity wore down the legitimacy of the judicial structure to such an extent that lawmakers and laypeople alike are leaning increasingly toward following their own interpretations of the law.

Without a common goal and a collectively adopted constitution, we will never have a stable government and a solid Jewish state. Our common law should be the law that was the basis of Jewish peoplehood: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Even when the people of Israel could not practice it, they always strove for it. If they do not, they are not regarded as Israel.

Currently, because no effort, or even aspiration to unite exists within the people of Israel living in the State of Israel, we are not Israel. What are we then? We are a collective of persecuted migrants and refugees, many of whom feel that the country they live in does not belong to them and dream of the moment they can return to the country from which they or their parents were chased away.

Herzl’s vision of forming a safe haven for Jews is not enough. If this is the only reason for our gathering here, we will not be able to form a cohesive and stable society. The obstinate, opinionated nature of our people will soon take over, and division and hostility will develop. This is what is happening to Israel today. As a result, the political parties have splintered and become fragmented, and a succession of elections ensued.

If we want to stabilize the Israeli society and prevent its disintegration, we need to fall in line behind a single goal that we value more than our own opinion. Also, the goal of our country should not be to save the Jews, but to save the world from division and conflict.

The reason Israel is always at the center of attention, especially in times of conflict, is that the world looks to Israel for example. Since the inception of our people, we have been tasked with serving as a model of unity. Our ancestors assembled from numerous tribes, clans, and countries, and pledged to love each other more than themselves. This is unheard of by today’s ostensibly civilized standards. In the ancient world, this was utterly inconceivable.

Nevertheless, our ancestors attempted it and succeeded. Moreover, they proved that when they unite, they triumph and overpower any nation that challenges them. They proved that military and economic success depend, in the case of the people of Israel, solely on their unity.

Alternatively, when they became divided and hostile toward each other, they demonstrated weakness, and foreign nations overpowered them and exiled them. Our unique nation, therefore, became the first nation that could choose its own fate. When it chose unity, it succeeded; when it chose division, it failed. In a sense, our nation was a proof of concept, a “pilot,” as historian Paul Johnson called us. We proved that foreigners can bond in peace and love if they value unity more than their own culture and tradition.

The modern-day curse of endless elections reflects a decline in the level of the unity of our people in the State of Israel. Instead of lining up around the tenet of unity above all other considerations, each party promotes its own agenda and claims that it will lead Israel to success. Yet, they are all wrong because if their ideas do not require national unity as a precondition, it makes no difference what agenda they support; it is condemned to failure.

Only when we realize our unity, above all differences, will the curse of perpetual elections be removed. Moreover, only when we realize this will the danger of another cataclysm to the Jewish people be averted, as Israel becomes what Israel is meant to be: “a light [of unity] to the nations.”
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Israel – the Ever-Electing Country”

Nearly forty years ago, Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz published a book titled Israel – The Ever-Dying People. Since nearly four years ago, Israel has become the ever-electing country. For the fifth time in less than four years, Israel is going to the polls again.

The coalition that has just dispersed itself was truly unique, even by Israel’s standards. In this coalition, everyone sacrificed their principles for one common goal: preventing a common political rival from remaining Israel’s prime minister. And if the only reason to sacrifice everything is to prevent someone else from being in power, it is clear that the only purpose of this government was to stay in power.

As things stand now, it is clear that we cannot have a leadership; we cannot have a government. We cannot have a government because we do not have a country. There is no nation, no constitution, and no understanding whatsoever how to do it right. Instead, we are only trying to survive.

It is not as if we do not know how we should conduct ourselves. We have all the knowledge, but we never use it. To use it, we must build a nation, and then we will merit a state.

A nation is a collection of people, a community bonded by a common goal. Currently, millions of people have come to Israel, but they have no common goal, no sense of solidarity, community, or anything that defines us as a nation. To define us as a nation in the State of Israel, we need to know the purpose of the existence of the State of Israel.

First, we need to understand that merely serving as a safe haven for Jews does not work. We can already see that settling for a place where Jews can be secure and feel at home does not work; it is simply not enough. In truth, when Jews gather in one place, it starts a fire, and the State of Israel exemplifies it.

Therefore, for Jews to assemble at a certain place, they need to be prepared for it. They need to know where they are going and why.

This place, the State of Israel, exists in order to allow Jews to rebuild their nationhood, to turn themselves into a united Jewish people, and not a splintered mass divided into dozens of parties that despise one another and cooperate only in order to oust a common foe whom they hate more than they hate each other.

Only if this throng becomes a unified mass, bonded by mutual solidarity, it will merit the title “nation.” Unlike other nations, which have common national symbols or geographical characteristics, our only unifier is the ideology of unity itself.

When we merit the title “nation,” we will also know what our constitution is, since there will be only one item in it: unity above all differences. This is the uniqueness of the people of Israel, and where such a nation lives becomes the Land of Israel.

A few days ago, head of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh called on the Palestinians to prepare themselves to return to Palestine since Israel is in a state of political disintegration that reflects the dead-end to which the Zionist project has come. “The beginning of defeat,” he said, “is disintegration from within.”

Regrettably, Haniyeh is correct. In our current state, the State of Israel has no future.

Unless we take upon ourselves the only constitution suitable for the Israeli people, a constitution of unity and solidarity at all costs and above any division, our country will not be here for long. If unity is our goal, we will succeed in everything. If it is not, we will disintegrate and be driven out.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Israeli Ideology and the Next Revolution”

With all the turmoil happening around the world, it makes one wonder when and where the next revolution might take place, and what ideology it will promote, if any. There is a difference between a coup and a revolution. In the first, one leader overthrows another in a struggle for power. In the second, one ideology, one worldview takes the place of another. The latter kind is what interests me, especially when it comes to the Israeli ideology.

By “Israeli ideology,” I am not referring to Zionism, but to the ideology that engendered the Jewish people. It is an ideology that emerged nearly forty centuries ago, adapted its manifestations to the times, and survived nearly twenty centuries until it went into a coma in the first centuries of the Common Era.

The progenitor of this ideology was Abraham, the biblical revolutionary who proposed a conceptual revolution to his Babylonian countryfolk and was expelled from his homeland as a punishment. Abraham discovered that only one force operates all of reality and sought to share his revelation with his people. But just as Galileo, who was forced to renounce his discovery that the Earth circles the Sun and not the other way around, said, E pur si muove (And yet it moves), Abraham insisted on the validity of his revelation that there is only one force. For this, he was exiled.

Unlike Galileo, Abraham was not alone. Thousands of people followed him and set off a movement based on a novel perception of reality. That movement became the Hebrews, the Israelites, and finally the Jews, and their ideology was based on unity as a means to become similar to the singular force. Accordingly, they established their society on the principle of mutual responsibility, and strove to love each other as themselves.

It was not easy to pursue such an unnatural paradigm, but the rewards they reaped when they succeeded were enormous. Alternatively, the torments they suffered when they abandoned their ideology were equally horrendous.

At around the beginning of the Common Era, Abraham’s spiritual heirs had lost touch with their ideology. The basic tenets of mutual responsibility and love of others, through which Abraham had established his society, and whose descendants kept with all their might, had vanished from among the Jews and they dispersed around the world.

There have been countless revolutions since Abraham’s revolution, but none was quite like his: aspiring to bring all of humankind into a state of unity and mutual responsibility through personal transformation of people’s own volition. The revolutions we have seen since then attempted to force people into social structures that they believed were just, but they did not aspire to establish them on free choice, but on forced conversion. Abraham, the man of mercy, only offered his ideas, and those who agreed with him had joined him.

In the middle of the previous century, Baal HaSulam, the great kabbalist and thinker, wrote the following chilling words: “humanity has already thrown itself to the extreme right, as with Germany, or to the extreme left, ‎as with Russia. But not only did they not ease the situation for themselves, they have worsened ‎the malady and agony, and the voices rise up to heaven, as we all know.”

Today, when we are all connected in so many ways, when we infect each other with viruses, deny each other gas, food, computer chips that cripple our economies, it is clear that we need another ideological revolution. As Baal HaSulam wrote, we have tried all the extremes, and they have all failed us. Therefore, I do not think we need a new ideology, but simply to awaken Abraham’s forty-century-old ideology from its coma, and strive to unite as one, in similarity with the one force that operates reality. If we do so, we will find ourselves living in a calm and durable world, without scarcity or misery.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Alternative Network to ‘The Mapping Project’”

The Mapping Project is an undertaking closely resembling what was done during the Nazi era when Jewish businesses were singled out and marked in preparation for the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938. The project—a database recently launched for Massachusetts which includes the addresses of synagogues, Jewish organizations, businesses, institutions and names of their staffers accused of being behind “the colonization of Palestine”—shows that the enemies of Israel are constantly adopting new and more daring forms of attack against us.

Those behind The Mapping Project, a new version of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, do not reveal their identities but are not shy about disclosing their dangerous intentions. “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them,” can be read on their website. The FBI is investigating the origin and potential threats of this initiative which links the support for Zionist causes to white supremacy, US “imperialism”, and “other harms” in society.

I hope our haters will not be able to weaken us, but there is still something to fear. They have great power because inside every person there is a potential antisemite that can be triggered, and the haters of Israel and the Jewish people in general can always be trusted to know how to move their tentacles and expand their reach.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, in many antisemitic initiatives such as the BDS movement and others, those helping our haters are Jews themselves. For generations, Jews have been associated with antisemites, and they are the greatest haters of their own nation when they reject the vocation to unite “as one man with one heart,” for which our nation was founded.

True Judaism works to sweeten the innate egoistic desire within every person and directs all human beings towards connection under the tenet, “love your neighbor as yourself,” as the supreme rule for the Jewish people. This same precept should also bring the rest of humanity to embrace and support one another and to connect with the Creator. That is the true Zionist approach. The opposite—meaning, separation, war, hatred, mutual rejection—is anti-Zionism.

There is such a big struggle and gap between these two opposing visions that there is no middle ground that connects them. Therefore, based on my own experience, there is no point in getting into arguments with antisemites. In the past, I have tried to talk to them logically. I invited them for open conversations hoping to change their minds, and nothing helped.

The silver lining of this situation is that antisemites actually help Zionists—by spitting fire at us, they prevent us from falling asleep on duty. This is how Jews from all walks of life wake up and come closer to realizing the Jewish-Zionist idea.

Now that the mapping project targeting us is emerging, we must strengthen and act beyond the mutual ego that separates us, create an ironclad bond between us, and through it connect with the force that controls everything in reality, the force which is the foundation of the Israeli nation.

We should not waste effort building any network especially to counter-attack our haters, but instead should build a network of connection and love between us, and through that, our haters will fall. We do not have to look in their direction; we have to look in our own direction, in how much we achieve a deep connection of our hearts, desires, passions, goals, so we can build one common goal of mutual support. This connection will be the solid and lasting Jewish network that no enemy that raises its head against us will be able to breach.
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