WINNIPEG – War does not always arrive with tanks and missiles. Sometimes it arrives veiled in boycotts, campus protests, social media disinformation, and mobs chanting for the elimination of the Jewish state. For too long, Jewish leaders have treated this campaign as a nuisance rather than what it truly is: a coordinated war of attrition against Israelโs legitimacy and Jewish security everywhere.
In every war, knowledge is the first weapon. No general would go into battle without intelligence on the enemy: their movements, their funding, their networks, their leaders. Yet when it comes to the sprawling ecosystem of anti-Israel activists, organizations, and their financiers, Jewish institutions often know little. The result? We are consistently caught on the defensive, reacting to well-orchestrated assaults while our adversaries advance their agenda unchecked.
The time for passivity has expired. We must face reality: this is not a debate, it is a war. Those who campaign for Israelโs destruction, whether on university campuses, in city halls, or on city streets, are part of the same fight against Jewish survival and sovereignty. If their strategies are coordinated, then ours must be doubly so.
This means building comprehensive dossiers on the individuals and groups who dedicate themselves to dismantling the Jewish homeland. It means mapping the ideological pipelines that link radical academics to NGOs, foreign funding sources, and extremist street movements. It means understanding their alliances, their finances, their messaging, and even the hashtags they utilize.
Some will object that such seriousness is too confrontational. But war is not won by wishful thinking or polite conversation with those who reject your right to exist. Israel has always survived not by naivetรฉ but by vigilance and resolve. The Jewish people did not endure centuries of persecution to crumble under pressure from activist networks fueled by petro-dollars and cloaked in pseudo-progressive language.
We must make it clear: if you dedicate yourself to destroying the Jewish state, your name will not be forgotten, your strategies will not remain hidden, and your lies will not go unchallenged. Just as Israel deploys the Iron Dome to identify and neutralize rockets before they land, global Jewish leadership must create an intellectual Iron Dome, tracking, anticipating, and neutralizing the political, cultural, and financial projectiles aimed at us every day.
History teaches a painful truth: Jews cannot afford complacency. From pogroms to Auschwitz, the failure to identify threats early has always carried a catastrophic price. This war is not fought on distant battlefields, but in the streets of Winnipeg, New York, London, and Paris; in university lecture halls; in legislative chambers. And in this war, intelligence is everything.
The mission, then, is clear. Jewish leadership must begin to act as generals in a battle for survival, not administrators of community affairs. The stakes demand nothing less.
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