“I’m telling you, Israel is facing 'a perfect storm' in the U.S. We are at risk of losing American support within a few years”, he warns with a concerned look, “I’m worried about the day when people understand the tone emitted from Washington and begin to take action. For example, I am not ruling out the possibility of arrest warrants being issued against Israeli leaders for war crimes”.
No, no, this conversation did not take place in the last few weeks, as one might deduce from its relevance. Yossi Hollander, an Israeli businessman and philanthropist who divides his time between Kfar Shmaryahu and California, made these statements and expressed many other warnings that came true, in late 2021. My reaction, to my great shame, was something along the lines of, “You don’t say. That really is disturbing. May I have another espresso?”
We were at a coffee shop in Ramat HaSharon surrounded by high-profile Israeli figures on the way to or from another exit or a family trip to Thailand. Israel was an economic superpower, a regional superpower – confident and smug. The future seemed rosy and safe. Nothing of what has been happening over the last eight months seemed logical, it was not even considered an option. But Hollander was serious, holding a position paper that he had been promoting for several months, unsuccessfully trying to interest politicians, defense personnel, policy setters and journalists.
“American academia is leaning more and more to the left”, he warned, “it is a strong center of progressive ideology impacting future appointments and influencing academic curricula. There are campaigns funded by the Gulf States, also supported by known terrorist organizations and BDS supporters, including blatant anti-Israeli and antisemitic statements on many campuses, including the most prestigious and well-known, like Harvard, Columbia and more. Many of the students are already 'primed' in high school, where Qatari and other funds have already infiltrated their curricula”.
We parted ways about an hour later, during which Hollander unloaded his take on the gloomy reality and his even gloomier forecast for the future. There was another phone call or two after that, followed by a long disconnection. I, like officials more senior and significant than me, disregarded Hollander’s forecasts and his ominous position paper.
Then came October 7, followed by the turbulent demonstrations at U.S. universities, the incomprehensible sights of young Americans in keffiyehs bearing “From the River to the Sea” signs, hostile media statements, delayed arms shipments and the cold shoulder from the Biden administration, as well as the sword over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in the form of arrest warrants from the International Court of Criminal Justice.
Hollander sent me a WhatsApp a few weeks ago, leading to another meeting – this time in his spacious home in Kfar Shmaryahu – which can only be defined as an “I told you so” meeting. But it ended on an optimistic note that not all is lost and there is still room to make amends.
Between Golani and Washington
Hollander was born in Haifa in 1957. He grew up in Ramat HaSharon and served in the IDF in the Golani Brigade as a machine gun operator. Following an injury, he was posted to Military Intelligence's Unit 8200 and, upon discharge in the late 1970s, he founded a software company called New Dimension, engaged mainly in business process automation.
After investing around $20,000 and a few failures, the company developed a winning product and went public in 1992. In 1999, the company was sold for $650M, a price tag that is considered unusual even by today's standards. “It was Israel’s biggest exit until then”, he recalls, “and I went on to establish other companies, but I also decided to dedicate 50% of my time and 50% of my money to philanthropy. I chose to focus on three interrelated topics: the State of Israel, the Holocaust and the war on antisemitism”.
Hollander founded the Economic Planning Institute where he helped plan and lead some of the most significant reforms in Israel’s economy. In addition, he helped finance Yad Vashem’s historical project, compiling the names of 5 million victims to date. Concurrently, he devised the largest program for Holocaust studies in the U.S., training 45,000 American teachers just last year.
Over time, he gained a deeper understanding of American politics, mainly of its Israeli and Jewish angles. He serves on the board of the Israel-American Council and is very familiar with the processes occurring in American society, mainly as related to the progressive movement, whose ugly face has only been recently exposed to the Israeli public.
The position paper that he showed me at the time, said: “…The U.S. is undergoing an internal process unrelated to Israel: it is in the midst of a comprehensive internal social and political struggle that began in the 1960s but has recently escalated. Underlying this evolutionary process is a takeover attempt by so-called “Progressives”, on the one hand, against traditional and moderate Democrats on the other. Powerful foreign actors are also engaged in this internal American struggle, attempting to introduce disputes and promote their agendas. Examples of such foreign players are Russia and China, challenging the U.S. in the battle over global hegemony, as well as Qatar, which finances the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Pro-Palestinian protest encampment at Columbia University
(Photo: AP/Stefan Jeremiah)
“Israel and the Jews are not a major element in the progressive agenda. Israel actually has many friends in the progressive movement. Nevertheless, anti-Israeli and antisemitic organizations, as well as governments (i.e. Qatar), are leveraging the political trends to integrate their ideas into multiple progressive agendas. Israel is an easy scapegoat that can be blamed and censured by large sectors of society.
“Israel’s political and defense mechanism is not sufficiently aware of these developments, failing to identify the scope of the dramatic changes in American society and the forces operating therein. One of the most popular 'conceptions' is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruined the relations with the Democratic Party and that a new approach to improved communications – ‘hasbara’ (advocacy) – will solve the problem. That is a strategic mistake, similar to the conception that prevailed before the Yom Kippur War, a conception that could lead to a political and economic 'Yom Kippur' and pose a real threat to Israel’s existence."
Soft war
He proposed plans for coping with the new reality back then. “The Israeli government and defense establishment must immediately direct significant resources to study the problem and develop an action plan in the next six months. A team appointed by the prime minister (underscoring its strategic importance), consisting of members of the intelligence community, Mossad, Foreign Ministry and non-government experts, will be able to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the issue and propose an action plan”.
Did you show this document to the last prime ministers? Defense ministers? Mossad directors, etc.?
“Let’s just say that the most senior levels in the political and the defense establishment have read it, or at least heard of its main points – including opposition leaders, by the way”, he says, but refuses to disclose any names.
“But instead of taking sophisticated action, which we will discuss in a minute, they always talked to me about 'hasbara,' a word that I loathe in this context. We need to take action within the realm of perception. Did someone 'advocate' to everyone on how to buy soap or a car? Or were you just exposed to mind games and repeated messages on various platforms? Why does it have to be different here?
“Authoritative and baritone interviews to American media outlets, which Prime Minister Netanyahu excels in, are nice, but that’s the 'hasbara' of yesteryear. It is a tool that is no longer effective, especially when facing the young generations who live in a world of narratives and identity politics. This generation lives and breathes TikTok, it learns most of what it knows on that platform, it dedicates hours of its time to it every day. TikTok is the world’s most powerful educational system, definitely in the U.S. Within 30 minutes of opening an account on TikTok, youngsters will receive anti-Israeli and anti-American messages, regardless of their profile or preferences. The Chinese government has already admitted to managing the platform’s algorithm. U.S. Congress has already passed a broadly supported law by which TikTok's U.S. operations will be sold to an American entity and, in the absence of a buyer, it will be shut down. I can’t understand why it’s not outlawed in Israel."
So TikTok is our problem? Isn’t it a bit more complicated?
“You must understand that there is, what I call, a 'soft war' against us, led and financed by Qatar, Iran, as well as Russia and China as a derivative of their war against the Americans. Immediately after the massacre, on October 8, flights departed from Iran to Indonesia and other destinations around the world in order to operate their bot machine. They take the battle for the narrative very seriously and it fits perfectly with the trends already occurring in the U.S. These countries’ money and motivation joined forces with the progressive movement in the U.S. and began to use it. And so, on everything related to Israel and Jews, anti-Israeli groups encourage the progressives to classify Palestinians and Jews by race.
“This led to the perception that Palestinians are 'indigenous natives' and 'people of color,' while Israelis and Jews are 'privileged and colonialist white Europeans.' After years of well-funded libelous campaigns, Israel has become for many in the progressive movement a model of imperialist white supremacy. The Palestinian struggle merged with all of the other progressive factors. They do not at all care that Jews are historical victims of genocide and also the victims of October 7 and that fact does not impact their thinking.
“Israel’s enemies are riding the progressive wave. The combination of antisemitic and anti-Israeli tendencies in the radical left, along with a strong and well-funded Islamic influence, is very dangerous to Israel’s future, as we can see today. In the past months, that narrative has grown into rejecting Israel’s right to exist and denying 3,000 years of Jewish bond to the land. It is important to understand that the Qataris and Iranians saw what was happening in the U.S. educational systems. They understood that their huge investment over the years has paid off and, since October, their appetite has grown leading to increased budgets for their influence campaigns, large Iranian bot farms and more – fuel that is poured onto the bonfire of hate and which percolates to the local councils, municipalities, national politics and, from there, to the administration.”
When do you think this process started?
“The process has been going on for about 30 years, but it gained great momentum after Obama was elected. I can tell you that, following his inaugural speech, where he talked about 'fundamental change' in the U.S., I went out and bought a gun because I realized that social constructs were about to collapse. By the way, Jews are the biggest buyers of weapons for self-defense today, many of them Democrats. In any case, after Obama was elected, the progressive movement realized that it would not be able to change American laws or the Constitution, but it would be able to replace the people at the main and important junctions. And indeed, since then, you can see a very clear process of the declining rule of law, a revolving door in prisons, images of lawlessness that we see in California and elsewhere, where people walk into stores, load up goods and leave, without paying and without worrying about the police."
On the road to world war
Despite his grim forecast, Hollander believes that not all is lost. “Most Americans still support us, but with every day that goes by, we lose a little in the battle for perception and things can deteriorate fast. We must understand that we don’t have much time. Months, perhaps several years, to stop the flow and change the picture. After all, the youngsters being brainwashed today are the decision-makers of the future. They are the deans of the next decade, the judges, the secretaries of defense, secretaries of state. One of the Keffiyeh wearers on campus may just be the next president. That is why we must first understand that it is not about an internal Israeli agenda.
"It is not about Bibi, yes or no. True, 'he is the head, he is responsible' for everything that happened in the last decade, for better or worse, especially his inaction in the arena of public perception. But I believe that all of Israel’s elite of the past decades share that guilt with him. There is no real analysis of our global situation and that trend has been going on for decades, even before Netanyahu. Bennett and Lapid didn’t do anything either.
“So, first of all, we must realize that the war from outside is against us as Israelis, as Jews, it is not against Netanyahu. We must also understand that we should not expect empathy. My heart truly breaks for the hostages, but I think that the Israeli campaign, focusing on the hostages, is a mistake. It is important to understand that, at any given moment, there are dozens if not hundreds of Americans kidnapped around the world. All Americans encounter photos of missing children on a daily basis. It’s part of life there. As awful as it sounds, the issue is transparent to them.
“What can work is communicating the atrocities. The appalling footage. Why do you think the West eventually decided to destroy ISIS? Only because of the horrible beheadings and live burnings. Average Americans supported the war against those murderers because they saw the atrocious clips and were afraid that it would reach their doorstep. I don’t understand why they didn’t publish the worst footage, why they didn’t edit them into short clips and why they didn’t invest millions of dollars in distributing it to youngsters around the world. Screening a 45-minute film to some diplomats in a dark theater is okay, but it’s nothing compared to the machine we are facing and it does not do the job or pressure the masses at the grassroots.
“But the main thing that Israel should do is understand that we are at war and to fight back. To start a 'soft war' too. Qatar is a very dangerous enemy and it is ridiculous that it is a party to the negotiations for releasing the hostages. Qatar must be defined as an enemy state and all of its terror funding means and measures must be exposed. We need to put together an army of bots, dedicated departments with intelligence, cyber and content professionals and give them two missions: one – to present a different narrative of the Qatari/Iranian story but, most importantly, on the other hand, to forcefully and wisely shut their project down. We must destroy their bot farms.
“It’s not my job to say what to do and how. I’m a businessperson. But I am convinced that there are various ways to do it and I trust the creativity and boldness of Israel’s security forces. They have demonstrated those skills countless times over the years. We must understand that this is an existential battle, no less significant than the battle against nuclear weapons. In terms of a state, it’s not even too expensive. I estimate it at about $100 million a year. It’s not even the cost of the new F35 squadron that is currently on the table. It is the price of one F35 for several years, including its maintenance.
“The prime minister should urgently convene the heads of the relevant security organizations, demand the formulation of such an operative plan and budget it. He should take the deputy chief justice and attorney general to a meeting and encourage them to approve such maneuvers, just as in other operations where the state realized and defined as a first-degree national security interest in the past."
I was not completely convinced that things could still be turned back, but based on experience, I realized that his forecasts should be taken seriously.
Where do we go from here?
“The good news, which is also very bad, is that we are part of a global trend and the world will not focus just on us. I am worried that a world war in the foreseeable future is not an unreal option."
Oh. So where’s the best place to live in this case?
“If all you care about is surviving, choose a country that you don’t hear about in the news”.