The World Jewish Congress, founded in Geneva in August 1936, returned this month to the city of its birth for the WJC Governing Board meeting of 2026. The Governing Board is where the strategic priorities of the international Jewish diaspora are set \u2014 the WJC federates communities from more than a hundred countries, and remains its principal diplomatic voice before governments and international organizations. This year\u2019s meeting took place in the long shadow of October 7, 2023, in a city that is also home to the UN Human Rights Council that has condemned Israel more often than Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela combined.\n<\/p>\n
Onto that platform stepped Mathias D\u00f6pfner, Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, one of Europe\u2019s most powerful media houses \u2014 owner of Bild, Welt, Politico, and Business Insider. D\u00f6pfner is rare in contemporary European public life: a corporate leader who is also one of the continent\u2019s most outspoken defenders of liberal democracy and the State of Israel. He is not Jewish. He calls himself, with deliberate provocation, a goy. In Geneva, he delivered perhaps the most uncompromising public address of his career, and closed it with a sentence that should now be circulated across every European chancellery and every Western university common room: \u201cWe all shall be Zionists.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Five proposals, no caveats<\/p>\n
D\u00f6pfner refused to give \u201canother \u2018Never Again\u2019 speech.\u201d The phrase has become moral lip service: if it meant anything, there would have been no October 7 pogrom, no chants of \u201cdeath to the Jews\u201d in European capitals, no Jewish parents afraid to send children to school in a kippah. So instead, he put five concrete proposals on the table \u2014 and did not soften them with diplomatic hedges.\n<\/p>\n
First, zero tolerance. Open hatred of Jews \u2014 in word and in deed, regardless of origin \u2014 must result in expulsion wherever the law permits. He cited British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch\u2019s blunt formulation: \u201cAnything that\u2019s inciting violence against Jews has got to go.\u201d Not only in Britain. In every democratic country.\n<\/p>\n
Second, preferential immigration and citizenship for Jewish families in Europe. The numerical contrast is stark. Jews are 2.2 percent of the American population \u2014 roughly 7.7 million. In the European Union and the United Kingdom combined, they are 0.2 percent \u2014 about one million, ten times less. Europe, D\u00f6pfner argued, must become more Jewish. If the continent intends to take its own rhetoric of multiculturalism and tolerance seriously, that means making Jewish life more visible, not less. The proposal is striking precisely because it is so rare to hear from a European executive at his level \u2014 and so obviously correct.\n<\/p>\n
Third, regulation of social media platforms \u2014 and TikTok above all. Censored by the Chinese Communist Party, the platform operates almost unchecked in Western democracies, where it is now the single most influential information channel for young people. In the month after October 7, pro-Palestinian posts on TikTok outnumbered pro-Israeli ones by seventeen to one \u2014 a great many of them openly antisemitic, full of conspiracy theory and direct incitement. The United States has forced TikTok\u2019s Chinese parent into a sale. Europe, D\u00f6pfner said, must follow. That a platform feeding the user data of European children to the intelligence service of a Communist dictatorship operates with effectively no editorial liability is, in his words, \u201ca macabre joke of history.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Fourth, expose woke ideology as a Trojan horse. Under the banner of decolonization, anti-racism, social justice, and climate activism, raw antisemitism is now routinely smuggled into respectable institutions. Greta Thunberg, he observed dryly, no longer seems much concerned with the carbon footprint, but increasingly concerned with stoking antisemitic prejudice. The woke movement, infiltrated and reshaped by Islamists, has executed a re-evaluation of all values: success is suspect, weakness is virtue, and whoever decides who counts as a victim wields the new moral power. And the movement, D\u00f6pfner said with characteristic precision, has decided that the victims are the antisemites. Where \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d is chanted on campuses, where Jewish students are harassed and Israel\u2019s right to exist is denied, \u201cthe Enlightenment ends and hell begins.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Fifth, the duty of memory. D\u00f6pfner described a journey he had taken into the eastern Polish borderlands \u2014 to the killing fields of Operation Reinhard, where roughly 1.3 million Jews were murdered between August and October 1942. He walked the railroad tracks to Sobibor and Belzec, and ended at Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin, where he entered what is likely the only intact Holocaust gas chamber still standing. A \u201cshoebox\u201d in concrete. Blue chemical deposits on the walls. Glazed peepholes through which the guards watched their victims convulse. \u201cWe have reached the lowest point of human civilization,\u201d he said. Then he asked a question with the force of an accusation: why do so few non-Jewish donors fund the upkeep of Holocaust memorials? Is it really only the Jews\u2019 responsibility to ensure that their murderers are not forgotten?\n<\/p>\n
The West hates itself<\/p>\n
If the five proposals are the actionable spine of the speech, the diagnosis behind them is what gives it its force. \u201cIn antisemitism,\u201d D\u00f6pfner said, \u201cthe West hates and envies itself.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
That sentence deserves to be read slowly. The Jewish people, despite millennia of persecution, have shaped and enriched Western civilization in ways wildly disproportionate to their numbers \u2014 in business, science, medicine, culture, technology. Excellence, D\u00f6pfner observed, breeds envy. Envy is \u201cthe most sincere form of recognition.\u201d But envy left unanswered turns lethal. What the contemporary West can no longer tolerate in the Jews is precisely what the West used to claim as its own ideal: excellence, ambition, civilizational confidence, and the will to defend oneself.\n<\/p>\n
If the free world \u2014 not as a geography but as a set of values \u2014 does not defeat antisemitism, D\u00f6pfner warned, it will destroy itself. Postwar Germany is the cautionary case, and he was not gentle about his own country: a nation that broke its moral and spiritual backbone in the Holocaust and has remained, ever since, somewhat broken \u2014 without healthy patriotism, without genuine drive for excellence, trapped in an endless culture of guilt and atonement that has produced, tragically, no real consequences for the present. The Germany of the twentieth century, he said, should now serve the entire free world as a negative example.\n<\/p>\n
The largest immediate threat is Islamism. Islamist terror in the name of a hijacked religion is \u201cthe most aggressive and most dangerous attack on our values.\u201d Western passivity in the face of it may be the most suicidal mistake of our age.\n<\/p>\n
A call to non-Jews<\/p>\n
It is here that the speech turned, in its final movement, away from the Jewish community in the room and toward everyone else.\n<\/p>\n
The fight against antisemitism, D\u00f6pfner said, is above all a duty for non-Jews. \u201cIf you don\u2019t fight antisemitism out of altruism, you should at least do it out of egoism, out of a healthy self-interest.\u201d Patriotism and Zionism, he argued, are siblings. The allies of Israel who are not patriots of their own countries are false friends; one cannot defend Jewish self-determination while abandoning the civilizational basis from which that defense becomes coherent.\n<\/p>\n
And then the closing line. \u201cWhether Jew or non-Jew,\u201d D\u00f6pfner said, \u201canyone for whom democracy, freedom and humanity truly matter must be a Zionist today.\u201d Twenty years ago, he recalled, he had first made that declaration in a conversation with the writer and Nobel laureate G\u00fcnter Grass \u2014 who was revealed weeks later to have served in the Waffen-SS, and whose appalled reaction at the time, D\u00f6pfner noted, only confirmed that he had been right. \u201cWith the awareness that true tolerance must never, never again be tolerant toward intolerance \u2014 we all shall be Zionists.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Europe\u2019s moral test<\/p>\n
The phrase is not a slogan of exclusion. It is the opposite. It is a liberal proposition: that defending the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and security is constitutive of defending democracy itself, political freedom, and the principles of an open society. It is, in its essence, a defense of Western civilization against those who \u2014 from the left, from the right, or from the camp of jihadist Islamism \u2014 would prefer to see it dismantled.\n<\/p>\n
Europe now stands before a moral test. It will be judged not by what it declares at \u201cNever Again\u201d memorial events, but by what it does \u2014 or fails to do \u2014 when Jewish schoolchildren are afraid to walk into class, when judges refuse to see motive sitting on the perpetrator\u2019s phone, when Chinese-owned algorithms shape what Europe\u2019s children come to believe. The choice is not between pro-Israel and anti-Israel. It is between a Europe that defends its Jewish citizens, Israel\u2019s right to exist, and its own democratic values \u2014 and a Europe that hides behind empty words.\n<\/p>\n
Mathias D\u00f6pfner went to Geneva to remind everyone in that room \u2014 and everyone outside it \u2014 that those two Europes cannot coexist.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tYaakov Chaliotis is the founder of Group of Verified Intelligence (GVI), a London-based international research, due diligence, and verification firm that combines advanced quantitative analytics, artificial intelligence, data science, and algorithmic tools with high-calibre qualitative assessment. GVI specialises in delivering rigorous intelligence and advisory work across geopolitics, corporate strategy, and social media and marketing intelligence.
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\nOriginally from Cyprus, with roots in Kefalonia, Greece, Yaakov has lived and worked in London for the past fifteen years. Over the course of his career, he has held senior digital communications, strategy, and analytics roles across major organisations, helping Chief Executives, senior leadership teams, and UK government ministers make informed and effective decisions through data-driven insights and strategic analysis.
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\nHis previous roles include serving as Digital Strategy Manager at the UK National Lottery during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, working at the UK Department for Education during the pandemic, and later holding the position of Global Brand Analytics Lead at Shell.
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\nAlongside his professional work, Yaakov is an active member of the Jewish Diplomatic Corps of the World Jewish Congress, contributing to global Jewish diplomatic efforts with a particular focus on combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The World Jewish Congress, founded in Geneva in August 1936, returned this month to the city of its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[4559,197,65,35699,1106,8475],"class_list":["post-65503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-geneva","tag-antisemitism","tag-europe","tag-geneva","tag-israel-at-war","tag-united-kingdom","tag-zionism"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116574758282354008","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}