Why Israel must exist

The worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on October 7, 2023. In response, the world stood up and declared, “Enough! Never again will we allow the torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder of our Jewish brothers and sisters.” Sadly, no. That’s not what happened. Instead, world leaders equivocated, expressing equal concern for the perpetrators of the attack. Leading humanitarian organizations declared the attack was understandable, if not justified. Student groups and other university-affiliated organizations at elite institutions of higher learning blamed Israel and raised hell on campus. Their blatant violations of university policies and the law went unpunished.

Jew-haters, Islamists, and their useful idiots in the West cheered for the terrorists that burned alive innocent Jewish families and kidnapped Jewish babies. They grew bolder as they found little resistance or reprobation. So, they took to city streets to menace Jews and vandalize Jewish neighborhoods and businesses, calling openly for the murder of all Jews and the destruction of Israel.

The Jews, the Jews, the Jews! It is truly remarkable how the world treats Jews, a people that has made such extraordinary contributions to mankind.

“I will insist the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.” – John Adams, US President

Keep in mind that Jews represent only 0.2% of the world’s population, that only 15 million have survived the relentless onslaughts of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Nazis, and Arabs. Even in America, Jews today represent only 2% of the population. But what marvelous contributions!

Medicine

In the field of medicine, Jews stand out. Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine for polio and, in 1955, made it publicly available free of charge and without patent. In the 1940s and 1950s, polio killed more than a half million people a year worldwide. In 1952 alone, it paralyzed more than 21,000 Americans, most of them children.

Many other Jews made many other contributions to the field of medicine. Baruch Blumberg developed the first vaccine for hepatitis B. Paul Ehrlich pioneered chemotherapy. Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups and the Rh factor, which allowed for life-saving blood transfusions for the first time in history. Wilson Greatbatch invented the first implantable pacemaker.

Selman Waksman pioneered research that led to the discovery of streptomycin, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis. Before streptomycin, tuberculosis killed 2-3 million people per year worldwide. Gertrude Elion invented the first immunosuppressive drug, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, as well as the antiviral drug acyclovir. Her work also led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow developed radioimmunoassay, which allowed blood donations to be screened for hepatitis and was the first effective means to measure insulin levels, which has saved millions of lives.

Ernst Boris Chain co-discovered the medical applications of penicillin at Oxford University. Penicillin and its antibiotic descendants are estimated to have saved 200-300 million lives in the 20th century alone.

Other discoveries and medical inventions by Jews include vaccinations for cholera and the bubonic plague, copaxone for treating multiple sclerosis, the pressure bandage, oral contraceptives, the pillcam, and the external defibrillator.

In fact, 60 Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have been awarded to Jews. People who today are an infinitesimal 0.2% of the world’s population have earned 26% of total Nobel Prizes awarded in this field.

“Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.” – Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine

Yet the world has never welcomed Jews. Instead, Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Spain in 1492. This was followed by centuries of expulsions from regions and towns in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in Europe. In 1791, Catherine the Great forced Jews from across the vast Russian Empire into the Pale of Settlement. In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. And in the mid-20^th century, nearly one million Jews (effectively all of them) were expelled from across the Arab world.

Science

Jews stand out in the field of science, too. Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity fundamentally changed our understanding of physics. Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, developed groundbreaking theories on atomic structure and quantum theory. In 1913, Bohr published his model of the atom, which proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus at fixed distances and at specific energy levels. His theory explained why atoms only emit light at certain wavelengths, which paved the way for many scientific advancements.

Gustav Hertz discovered key evidence for quantum theory, significantly advancing the field of quantum mechanics. His uncle, Heinrich Hertz, proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, which led to the development of radio, radar, and wireless communications. The Hertz family had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism a generation before, but even so!

We have Rosalind Franklin to thank for the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure. And Leó Szilárd for discovering the nuclear chain reaction, the foundation of all nuclear energy applications, from power generation to weapons.

And there have been so many others. In aggregate, this tiny 0.2% of the population has been awarded 25% of the Nobel Prizes in Physics (56) and 19% of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (37).

“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.” – Soviet Leader Josef Stalin

Yet Jews are the people Russia and the Soviet Union endlessly persecuted. It was the Russian secret police who created the libelous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in order to turn ordinary Russians against the Jews. It was the Russian government and secret police that sanctioned pogroms against the Jews. And it was the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin that sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the gulag system through antisemitic purges, such as the Great Purge, the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, the Night of the Murdered Poets, and the Doctors’ Plot.

Even after Stalin, state-sponsored antisemitism continued apace. Jewish enrollment was limited at Soviet universities. Jews were excluded from top government positions, military leadership, and sensitive scientific research. And it was de rigueur to accuse Jews of being traitors, spies, or agents of Western powers, as it was for state-controlled media to present antisemitic caricatures, conspiracy theories, and blame Jews for the nation’s economic problems.

Technology

The number of technological innovations made by Jews is remarkable. An Israeli Jew invented the USB flash drive. Another Israeli Jew invented anti-virus and firewall software. Other Israeli Jews invented RSA public key encryption, TDM over IP, the first widely used instant messenger application, and the highly popular Waze directions app, as well as the Intel 8088 microprocessor that powered IBM’s first PC, the machine that kickstarted the PC revolution.

And it was a Jew who helped develop laser technology, and nanowire, and who introduced temporal logic into computing science, and invented holography which is used today for imaging, data storage, and security.

A Jew named John von Neumann, often praised as the world’s smartest man, developed key foundational concepts in computing, including the von Neumann architecture that all modern computers use. He also played a critical role in the Manhattan Project, helping the United States develop nuclear technology and the atom bomb, which ended World War II.

Jews also invented or co-invented fiber optics, wireless remote controls, laser keyboards, sound-on-film, allowing sound to be recorded and synchronized with film, which catapulted Hollywood out of the silent movie era, as well as an early color television broadcasting technology, the instant camera, the camera phone, the pager, credit card magnetic strip encoding, the first word-processing computer, and cybernetics, which allowed for the development of artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, neural networks, and more.

Jews created and led some of the world’s largest and most important technology companies, from Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s Google to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook/Meta to Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Financial to Andy Grove’s Intel to Michael Dell’s Dell Computer to Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft to Larry Ellison’s Oracle to Hasso Plattner’s SAP to Jan Koum’s What’s App to Max Levchin’s PayPal and, most recently, to Sam Altman’s OpenAI.

“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.” - Nikola Tesla

Yet Jews are the people that Hitler and the Nazis tried to wipe off the face of the earth. With the willing support and assistance of European, Baltic, and Scandinavian countries, they shot millions of Jews into pits. They herded millions more Jews into cattle cars that transported them to death factories where they were murdered in gas chambers then turned to ash in crematoria. They imprisoned Jews in ghettos, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation, disease, and violence. They conducted countless hideous medical experiments on Jews. They did these things and more, all for the purpose of eliminating Jews from the world.

Defense Technology

In the defense sector, Jews have made outsized contributions, as well. Movie star Hedy Lamarr is also known as “the mother of wi-fi” for co-inventing a spread spectrum, frequency hopping radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Nazis. Today, her technology is a fundamental element of your mobile phone service.

It was an Israeli engineer, Abraham Karem, who invented Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) and another, Uziel Gal, who invented the Uzi submachine gun. Israeli engineers also invented the Iron Dome Missile Defense System, a revolutionary missile interception system that is the envy of every other military in the world.

And it was a Jew, Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Los Alamos lab of the Manhattan Project, which included the most important group, the project’s theoretical division. In fact, most of the leading scientists on his team were Jews, including such scientific luminaries as Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Victor Weisskopf, Max Born, James Franck, Otto Frisch, Isadore Rabi, Eugene Rabinowitz, Joseph Rotblatt, and Niels Bohr (whose mother was Jewish). The group included Jews originally from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Poland, and Denmark, as well as native born American Jews. Together, they developed the first atomic bomb, which is estimated to have saved millions of lives by bringing World War II to an end.

"A nation's ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability." - Sir Frank Whittle, Inventor of the Jet Engine

But again, these contributions amounted to very little in terms of the world seeing Jews as human beings. Jews were slaughtered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, while German police forces stood by impotently. Jews were blown to bits while riding buses to school and to work in 1929, 1937, 1938, 1947, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1968, 1989, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2002, 2003, and 2004. Jews were murdered in their embassies in Thailand (1972), Sudan (1973), Austria (1981), France (1982), Argentina (1992), United Kingdom (1994), Mauritania (2008), India (2012), Georgia (2012), and India (2021). And Jews were murdered in their synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey (1986), and Djerba, Tunisia (2002), and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2018), and East Jerusalem (2023). The world continues to go about its business while the Jews continue to die.

Philosophy

Jews have made great contributions to the field of philosophy, from the earliest of times to the present. Most notably, the Old Testament contains the philosophical foundation that informs not just Judaism but Christianity and Islam, as well. Together, these three faiths provide moral and ethical guidance to more than half the world’s population.

Influential Jewish philosophers include Philo of Alexandria, who merged the Greek philosophies of Platonism and Stoicism with Jewish theology. Saadia Gaon wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions and integrated Jewish theology with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought. Then there was Solomon ibn Gabirol and Bahya ibn Paquda and Maimonides and Gersonides and Hasdai Crescas, as well as Baruch Spinoza, who is considered one of the founders of modern philosophy.

In the modern era, some of the great names in philosophy, those who have had truly significant impact on our world, are Jews. Their names are recognizable, and their books are still read and taught in our schools today. They include Franz Kafka, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, and many more.

“To them [the Jews] we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.” – Paul Johnson, Historian

Yet the Jews were subjected to countless pogroms in which death tolls reached the tens of thousands. These included major pogroms in Uman, Ukraine (1768), Warsaw, Poland (1788), Odessa, Ukraine (1821), Iasi, Romania (1859), Odessa, Ukraine (1871), throughout the Russian Empire (1881-1884), Moscow, Russia (1891), Oran, Algeria (1898), Bialystok, Poland (1899), Kishinev, Moldova (1903), Odessa and Kiev, Ukraine (1905), Bialystok, Poland (1906), Fez, Morocco (1912), Hebron, British Mandate of Palestine (1929), Baghdad, Iraq (1941), Aleppo, Syria (1947), Cairo, Egypt (1948), Baghdad, Iraq (1948), Istanbul, Turkey (1955), Libya (1967), and Tunisia (1967), to cite only a few.

The Arts

Jewish contributions to the arts span music, film, theater, comedy, literature, and much more. Music legends like Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein (his father was Jewish), George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkle, Gene Simmons, Carly Simon, Billy Joel, Adam Levine, and so very many more all are Jews.

As a young boy, the great Louis Armstrong worked for and became very close to a Jewish family in New Orleans, the Karnoffsky’s. He recognized the antisemitism they suffered and wrote in his memoirs, "I was only seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Armstrong also wrote that he learned from them, "how to live—real life and determination" and, as an adult, he wore a Star of David until the day he died.

In the film industry, all five of the major Hollywood film studios during the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’ were founded and run by Jews. One of the founders of Paramount Pictures was a Jew. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was founded by two Jews. Warner Brothers was founded by four Jewish brothers. RKO Pictures was founded by a Jew. Fox Film Corporation was founded by a Jew. And many of the smaller Hollywood studios during that era also were founded by Jews, including Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures.

So many film actors also were Jews, including such familiar names as James Caan, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Curtis, Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Allen, Barbara Streisand, Live Schreiber, Jake Gyllenhaal, Mila Kunis, Paul Rudd, Zach Efron, Scarlett Johansson and far too many others to list. Some Jewish actors felt compelled to change their names due to antisemitism. Emanuel Goldenberg changed his name to Edward G. Robinson. Issur Demsky became Kirk Douglas. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall. Winona Laura Horowitz became Wynona Ryder. And Natalie Hershlag became Natalie Portman.

To put it in perspective, consider Steve Martin’s opening monologue at the 2010 Academy Awards. Referencing the film Inglorious Basterds, Martin joked, “Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews.” Martin then spread out his arms as if to show Waltz the entire audience, adding, “Well, Christoph ... the Mother Lode!”

Jewish comedians were and still are too plentiful to list but included such greats as Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Peter Sellers, all Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, and Jerry Lewis from the old days and, in the modern era, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, and Seth Rogan.

In the world of literature, Jewish authors were as well known and highly esteemed. They included Boris Pasternak, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Heller, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, Judy Blume, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Emma Lazarus, who wrote the famous poem The New Colossus which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. In the field of literature, the world’s Jews, representing 0.2% of the population, earned 13% of all Nobel Prizes awarded for Literature (16).

And Jews were disproportionately represented in so many other aspects of the arts, from painters like Mark Rothko and Marc Chagall to Marvel superheroes creator Stan Lee to photographer Annie Leibovitz to composers Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler to conductors Leonard Bernstein and Andre Previn to composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim to fashion designers Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.

And museums. Without the vision and generosity of Jews like the Rothschild family, Solomon Guggenheim, Helena Rubenstein, the Bronfman family, the Lauder family, David Geffen, and so many others, the British Museum in London, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Broad in Los Angeles, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Smithsonian Institutions, and so many others would either not exist or would not be anything close to what they are today.

“I grew up in a tradition where having ideas and contributing to the community and creating art that had an impact on the world mattered. That’s part of the Jewish tradition.” – Eve Ensler, Jewish Author and Playwright

Despite their significant and lasting contributions to the arts, Jews were not welcome in America or most anywhere else in the world in their hour of greatest need. The Johnson-Reed Act (1924-1965) greatly limited the number of immigrants the United States would accept from less “racially desirable” groups, which included Southern and Eastern European Jews. Between 1933 and 1941, while six million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust, only 118,000 Jewish refugees were allowed to enter the United States. Many other nations simply refused to accept Jews attempting to flee Nazi persecution. One tragic example was the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that carried 937 desperate Jews in 1939. The ship was turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada, forcing it to return to Europe, where many of the passengers perished.

Even after the Holocaust, Jews were not welcome in other countries. Some 250,000 survivors were held in “Displaced Persons” camps until as late as 1952. Many of the camps were actually former concentration camps. Jews were not wanted.

Academia

Before the Holocaust, Jews were among the leading thinkers and professors at many of the great academies of Europe. Albert Einstein was a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. Edmund Husserl taught at University of Göttingen and University of Freiburg. Sigmund Freud was a professor at the University of Vienna, as was Ludwig von Mises. Moritz Lazarus was a professor at University of Berlin, Niels Bohr at University of Copenhagen, Émile Borel at École Normale Supérieure. And Hannah Arendt studied under Martin Heidegger at University of Marburg.

Jews have made significant contributions to such a wide range of academic fields. Paul Samuelson received a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work modernizing economic theory. Daniel Kahneman received a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on behavioral economics with Amos Tversky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Milton Friedman is still revered today as one of the great economic thinkers of the era. Abraham Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs. Joseph Stiglitz greatly advanced economic thinking on information and inequality. Israel Aumann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory. John Kemeny developed the programming language BASIC and was a pioneer in the systematic use of computers in education.

And Jews have been leaders in funding academia. Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars to fund research into artificial intelligence and genomics at universities. Michael Bloomberg donated $3.5 billion to Johns Hopkins University. David Geffen gave $400 million to UCLA and $150 million to Yale. Ron Perelman gave $400 million to Cornell. Michael Milken donated $80 million to George Washington University. Leonard Blavatnik donated $200 million to Harvard and $75 million to Oxford University. Other significant donors to academia include Ron Lauder (Penn), Edgar and Charles Bronfman (Harvard, NYU, McGill), the Pritzker family (University of Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard), Robert and Renée Belfer (Harvard and Cornell), Leslie and Abigail Wexner (Harvard and Ohio State), Henry Kravis (Columbia, Claremont McKenna), George Soros (Central European University in Hungary and Austria, Oxford, MIT, Harvard), and Bernie Marcus (Emory, Georgia Tech).

So many Jews have played major roles in founding, shaping, and leading elite universities. This includes Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman at University of Chicago, and countless others. And Brandeis University was founded by the Jewish community as a top liberal arts institution.

“The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.” – Leo Tolstoy, Author

Yet, these are the people whose admission to elite US universities was aggressively restricted in the first half of the 20^th century, as it had been elsewhere in the world for centuries before. Yale instituted an enrollment cap for Jews at 10% of admissions. Princeton and Dartmouth did the same but set their enrollment caps at 5%. Columbia set its cap initially at 20% but then reduced the figure. Penn set its cap at 15%.

They also developed other, less overt tactics to keep Jews out. These included in-person interviews, which allowed for rejecting Jews based on subjective character assessments. They prioritized applicants who played sports because far fewer newly immigrated, city-dwelling Jews had the luxury or the inclination to devote themselves to such nonessential activities. They established geographical preferences, knowing that Jews tended to be concentrated in certain major urban areas. Notably, these practices all still exist today, though few are aware of their original purpose.

Other Contributions

Jews have brought the world so much more. It was a Jew, Isaac Singer, who invented the sewing machine, which Mahatma Gandhi called, “one of the few useful things ever invented."

It was an Israeli Jew, Simcha Blass, who invented drip irrigation, which dramatically increased water efficiency in farming, allowing deserts to bloom and increased food production in places it was desperately needed. It was Israeli agricultural scientists who cultivated modern cherry tomatoes. It was a Jew who invented the ballpoint pen and stainless steel and jeans. It was a Jew, Sigmund Freud, who developed psychoanalysis.

And Jews have been tremendously generous. According to Forbes Magazine, Jews made up nearly half of America’s biggest philanthropic donors in 2022. According to Inside Philanthropy, a higher percentage of Jewish households give to charity than non-Jewish households. Jewish households, on average, give higher amounts than non-Jewish households. Jewish households are also more likely to give to non-religious organizations and causes than non-Jewish households.

In 2021, for example, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced $1.3 million in gifts to 11 Jewish groups, while distributing more than $900 million in total. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife, Connie, donated $1 million to Jewish causes, while giving away more than $800 million in total.

In addition to the 169 Nobel Prizes mentioned already, the world’s tiny population of Jews has earned nine Nobel Peace Prizes and 38 Nobel Prizes in Economics.

Yet these are the people the whole world seems to hate. According to the 2024 “Global 100” poll by the Anti-Defamation League, nearly half of the world’s adults “harbor deeply entrenched antisemitic attitudes.” That means some 2.2 billion people harbor a strong prejudice against the world’s 15 million Jews. In a troubling sign for the future, among respondents younger than 35, some 40% believe that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.” Let that sink in for a minute.

And Jews are the people the whole world turned on after October 7, 2023. Within a day of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel, people gathered outside the Sydney Opera House in Australia chanting, “Gas the Jews!”

Within a week, large numbers of anti-Israel protesters took to the streets in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Iceland, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and others, including nearly every country in the Middle East and North Africa.

Just two weeks after the attack, the Guardian’s headline read, “Antisemitic hate crimes in London up 1,350%, Met police say.”

Here’s the point. Jews have made amazing contributions to the world, far beyond what could ever be imagined for such a tiny population. Jews have done so for thousands of years. And for thousands of years, Jews have been persecuted and murdered. Their contributions haven’t mattered. Not one bit.

Jews need their own nation because they have been betrayed by so many other nations where they’ve lived.

Jews need their own government institutions because they have not been protected by the government institutions of so many of the other nations where they’ve lived.

Jews need their own army because it has become so painfully clear that if Jews relied on the rest of the world to protect them, there would be no more Jews.

This is why Jews need Israel.

“… with the rebirth of sovereign Israel we have finally broken the historic cycle: no more destruction and no more defeats, and no more oppression – only Jewish liberty, with dignity and honor.” – Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister