PJN interviewed David Garrett to get his opinion on current Jewish and Israeli issues. With a vast body of philosophical work, the interviewee agreed to our request.
PJN - What did Trump mean when he announced on April 10 that the Great Reset had begun? "World’s most powerful reset", he wrote. Does this have anything to do with Israel?
DG - It's something the American president knows will go down in history. If the post aimed to express Trump's thinking with which we are more familiar, it is likely that reset is linked to reshaping the current global order, in a way that he considers fairer for the United States, and which is certainly more or less in agreement with China and Russia. If, however, the post somehow reflects the thinking of Kushner or Vance, I guess that it is something related to the defense of what remains of Judeo-Christian Civilization. We are in April 2026, but you have certainly noticed that, in a few months, the international political game has changed a lot.
PJN - How can one defend Judeo-Christian Civilization today? What is left of it?
DG - As you know, Judeo-Christian Civilization was based on the basic values that arose from the Decalogue and on the joint work of Jews and Christians. Portugal, the United States and Russia, for example, would never have been great empires without the Jewish communities led by Yaish ben Yahia, Chaim Solomon or Horace Günzburg. Today, at a time when Jews and Christians are increasingly rejected as anachronistic throughout the world, the defense of what remains of Civilization must pass through the elimination of opposing forces and diplomatic efforts by contemporary superpowers to improve international legal instruments, which today we see with regret to be devoid of either a universal charter of human duties, or the protection of the natural rights of men recognized by all ethical traditions with a voice in the World Parliament of Religions.
PJN - The Israeli government has already assumed that it will participate in the defense of this Civilization...
DG - It is natural for the Jewish state to use the tools at its disposal for the defense of Judeo-Christian Civilization. Jewish human rights, like Christian human rights, are increasingly being denied, both individually and collectively. Freedom of association is constantly under devastating attack, although more or less camouflaged, for the simple fact that it promotes a common history between Jews and Christians that has always had the city of Jerusalem as its spiritual homeland. Transcendence, the rationality that surrounds the Universe, natural rights and human duties are not separated from the history of peoples. However, the United States Declaration of Independence and the Russian Constitution are among the few modern legal instruments that mention the word God.
PJN - The war against Iran was interrupted by a ceasefire that, although with breaches already recorded, is expected to be prolonged and definitive. Did Israel win this war, along with its American ally?
DG - The answer is more difficult than the question. To begin with, the war was not a war, but a battle. The battle was not against Iran, but against the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, it is not true that the conflict revolved around Israel, since it indirectly encompassed the US-China dispute, the two greatest superpowers of our time.
PJN - Who exactly cooked up the agreement on the ceasefire?
DG - USA, China and Russia. I have always argued that the battle should not have begun but should have been resolved from the outset by an agreement involving the superpowers. Moreover, it pains me that the voice of Iranian Jews has not been heard. Thousands of innocent people were killed. Iran has many alternative ways to obtain a nuclear warhead. Invading that country is impossible, because it is a hornet's nest the size of Europe, a kind of Vietnam six times as large.
PJN - How can Israelis be confident that Israel's small territory can escape a war between empires that have apparently faced each other in Iran, just as they have faced each other in Ukraine?
DG - The real existential threat to Israel would occur if it lost its "chess masters", Herzog and Netanyahu, to surrender to the arms of adventurous politicians or those blinded by ignorance and passion. Netanyahu and Herzog are very wise men in the matter of four thousand years of world history, always populated by hybrid wars between superpowers, with the Jews accustomed to surviving in the midst of so much gunpowder and so many conflicting interests. Israel is a very small territory, very small indeed, that could be entirely razed by a single nuclear submarine, and each superpower has many of them.
PJN - A few weeks ago, Netanyahu said that 90% of Israel's security problems originate in Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah.
DG - That was a speech aimed at the masses and, what is the same, at the media. The prime minister's message to the narrower political circles in which he moves directly identifies the Muslim Brotherhood as the real ideological and existential threat to Israel. Although theologically Sunni, the Brotherhood is a well-established bridge between radical Sunni Islam and the radical Shiite axis, strategic alliances that prioritize "Islamic unity" with a view to imposing Sharia, first in the West, and then trying its luck in Eurasia and Asia. That’s why the Brotherhood has been banned in the US, Russia, China and India. The superpowers do not want Sharia, nor internal problems of separatism, and much less the opening of their borders to terrorism.
PJN - And in Europe?
DG - The Brotherhood only freely operates in Europe and, frankly, is not a good sign for a century-old movement whose goal is Power. Europe has long ceased to be a politically relevant player. It only makes noise in the media. Dozens of unqualified politicians have been bent on destroying the very civilization they are supposed to serve. What we see is the absolute hostility they harbor against national histories. This type of policy will never serve to confront superpowers, win wars, maintain traditional values, and feed the populations. Nothing bodes well for a promising future for the new generations, and I even believe that there is a good chance that some so-called "political leaders" will end their lives in prisons in the East. The Tsar only ended the war against Napoleon when he entered Paris and the Emperor had to abdicate, which was repeated when Zhukov entered Berlin to visit the fuhrer.
PJN - The terrible fates of Napoleon and Hitler are impressive, despite the fact that they never dared to set foot in Siberia, which would have been much more devastating.
DG - The Israeli security apparatus that protects the nomenclature of Porto usually teaches something very simple. The U.S. is very strong in the midst of combustion, the Chinese are unsurpassed in silence, and the Russians are the Russians, as they have been at war for 1000 years.
PJN - Why is Israel not part of NATO?
DG - Israel has a close partnership with NATO, with the status of a "Major non-NATO ally", but rejects any kind of formal membership, either because it does not want to clash with the states of Asia and Eurasia, or because it wants to maintain its freedom of military action, without needing to ask anyone's permission and being bound by mutual defense obligations.
PJN - The Secretary General of NATO declared a few weeks ago that this is the strongest military organisation that has ever existed. Do you agree?
DG - The current Sino-Russian bloc does not need to have an acronym to possess the largest number of soldiers and weapons of mass destruction. We can also go back millennia, centuries or even decades to question Mark Rutte's statement. The Roman Empire was unrivaled in terms of military alliances with the best Gallic, Hispanic, German, Numid, Syrian armies, and many more. Napoleon's Grande Armée was already a kind of NATO, as it was remarkably diverse and composed of soldiers of many nationalities and with great ethnic and linguistic diversity. Even in the Second World War there was a kind of NATO that then united Americans and Soviets. The Soviet Union had battalions of soldiers as far as the eye could see, and like the U.S., it produced tens of thousands of tanks and planes in a few years.
PJN - Can the issue of NATO, which is now very disintegrated, be the definitive blow to Europe?
DG - Stalin once mocked the supposed power of the Catholic Church, stating that, because he had no military divisions, the Pope had nothing to say in the geopolitical and military affairs of his time. The reasoning can be applied today to the old continent. Europe will not succeed in turning national armies into the backbone of a new 'European Defence Union'. You don't do that with a few tens of thousands of men who, on top of that, have been encouraged for decades to paint their nails with red varnish and hate the history of their countries. To defeat the Eurasians is impossible.
PJN - Is Russia today an existential threat to Israel, insofar as it is an ally of Iran?
DG - The Russian-Iranian alliance is part of a war between Atlanticist and Sino-Russian blocs that has little or nothing to do with Israel. The concerns of the Jewish state, with 15% of the population speaking Russian, are heard daily in Moscow. It is a relationship characterized by strategic pragmatism and strict security coordination. Netanyahu is the right man to do this. He frequently highlights his personal relationship with the Kremlin as an asset to national security. And it is.
PJN - How do you see the Israeli stance of relative equidistance and neutrality towards Ukraine? Volodymyr Zelensky has already expressed frustration with the alleged "influence of Russia" in Israel.
DG - At the beginning of the conflict, Israel tried to position itself as a neutral mediator between Russia and Ukraine, given its good relationship with both nations. Naftali Bennet interceded with Putin so that Zelensky's physical health was safeguarded. However, it is necessary to understand that, for Israel, the relationship with Russia is much more important than with Ukraine. In the midst of all this tension, Zelensky did not prepare properly when he gave the speech to the Knesset in 2022 and aroused the ire of Israelis who accused him of blatant Holocaust denial. It was not with bad intentions, because he was at war and wanted to do his best to praise his people, but it really cannot be said generically that the Ukrainians saved the Jews 80 years ago. The entire population of Israel knows that there was widespread Ukrainian collaboration in the persecution and murder of tens of thousands of Jews. including the Babi Yar massacre on the outskirts of Kiev, one of the largest mass shootings of World War II.
PJN - How do you assess Zelensky's role in the years of war with Russia?
DG - What we saw in this twenty-first century was something unbelievable. A man of short stature, left the theater and directly confronted the Kremlin. No one counted on him, least of all on his energy, resilience, communication skills, and mastery of asking for money around the world. He is a rare, unpredictable man with extreme impact, what is usually called a "black swan".
PJN - What will happen now, given that the Kremlin and the Trump administration seem to be united in the sense of dispensing with Zelensky?
DG - Unfortunately, I don't think he has a promising future. No one could have more dangerous enemies... and so many. He faces the Kremlin, he faces very dangerous sectors of Ukrainian society eager to hang him, he faces the American arms lobby after having started selling cheap weapons to the Gulf countries. In the midst of all this, my biggest fear is how the Ukrainian Jewish community will be treated at the end of the conflict.
PJN - Do you think that the ancient Alaska purchase could one day give rise to future conflicts between Russia and the US, given that we live in a time when contracts are torn up with the greatest ease?
DG - The Russians already have too much territory to put themselves in open war with the US and mutually extinguish each other because of more square kilometers of ice. As strange as it may seem, a conflict between China and Russia over Siberia is much more foreseeable, as there are very old territorial issues between the two powers that have not been well resolved and have never aroused consensus. For now, Beijing is using economic agreements to extract timber, gas, minerals and energy on very favorable terms from Siberia, and in a way controls the local economy. I believe that when Putin leaves power, friction will appear again, as it did after Stalin's death.
PJN - When one thinks today of a war between empires, one guesses that the potential belligerents would be the United States and Russia, not the latter and China.
DG - I don't believe in it. The division of the world has already been done and duly signed. There may be minor disputes, insults at the UN, but this will not change the essential point and is fundamentally aimed at entertaining and confusing the masses and analysts. Besides, the Russian population is almost entirely concentrated in two cities, just as the American population is mainly concentrated in coastal areas. The submarines and torpedoes of the two belligerent empires would be enough to wipe out both countries at the same time. "Mutually Assured Destruction" remains the motto that prevents the possible confrontation that terrifies humanity. Only one territory would escape and that is Siberia.
PJN - Siberia?
DG - Siberia represents three quarters of the territory we call Russia. It is much bigger than China, bigger than India, and bigger than the US. In the event of a nuclear war between superpowers, everything on Earth will be consumed by fire, except for the Siberian underground cities, the military bases from the time of the USSR and the abundant energy resources of that immense area stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Ural Mountains.
PJN - In general, we only remember Siberia to talk about the old gulags.
DG - Siberia is a word that is not often heard. It is treated as if it were an ice desert reserved for bears. But everything exists there, great natural resources, great nuclear shelters and the neighbors with 4 billion people dedicated to daily work and, if necessary, to the army. Everything really exists there, even a fantastic Jewish community managed with zeal by Chabad Lubavitch.
PJN - My family on the Russian side always mentioned the existence of a Jewish Autonomous Oblast created by Stalin. I don't know if it still exists.
DG - Yes, there is. That's exactly what I was talking about, next to China. There are several active Jewish communities in the area. I heard from the Russian Chabad emissary in Birobidzhan that the Jews feel well protected, and do not want to leave, in case one day the great powers go to war. It is significant and it is even very moving.
PJN - Is this further proof that it is impossible to slaughter the Jews?
DG - I would say yes. The Jew anticipates the future of the world by centuries and is always prepared for good and evil. I often think that if I lived in Siberia, I would ask Chabad to leave the doors of the synagogues open, at least at a certain time, despite the cold, in case Mashiach suddenly appeared. Even if he did not appear, or if he took a long time, this would be one more factor in rallying the local Jews around good constellations and attracting Jewish visitors from all over the world, some of whom could settle there
PJN - Changing the subject, Netanyahu, the "chess master", is under siege. In the West he is hated, while in Israel he resumed his trial for alleged corruption.
DG - The Jewish state has to free itself from some crazy fads that it has absorbed from the West. It is the passionate fight against corruption that can become a weapon of mass destruction against Israel. We are in the middle of a war with the involvement of the superpowers. We can't play around with cigar boxes, champagne, small jewelry and even a toy doll for a child, all valued at a pittance, allegedly to ensure that a friend gets a visa to enter the U.S. and a guide through tax benefit legislation. The most serious part is that of the newspapers, or rather, the supposedly more favorable news treatment that was given to the prime minister in exchange for the production of regulatory legislation for the benefit of Yedioth Ahronoth and the Walla news site. In some countries that now accuse Netanyahu of corruption, the scheme is simple: the government pays the press all at once.
PJN - Where did the modern passion for fighting corruption come from?
DG - That's the right question. Great fashions never arise to protect populations. Many of the so-called "modern values" are themselves the moral corruption that should be fought without quarter, and which is nevertheless patronized, because it poisons the conscience and intelligence of the populations and is related to high geopolitical strategies that aim at everything but the good of the peoples. The murderous scheme took its first steps three decades ago and conglomerated the oligarchies then implanted internationally and nationally. Built on the traffic of favors, to maintain hegemony, these oligarchies found an easy way to take down potential "unauthorized" economic elites and, for that matter, any individuals who could endanger the game. It was the end of the Cold War. The common ideological enemy became the rich man without a godfather, and especially the Jew of endless work, who was seen as the main obstacle to the "efficiency of markets".
PJN - Wasn't the logic of fighting corruption and other related crimes such as influence peddling punishing "bad governance"?
DG - "Bad governance" became a very broad expression, because it extended from governments to private institutions. Any small association became a potential target of the so-called fight against corruption, which became a mechanism for criminalizing and polluting any nascent elites who were not affiliated with or did not want to adhere to the norms of neoliberal capitalism, self-defined as lawful. Thus, a new "universal value" was created (the fight against corruption), which was never included in the Decalogue. No wonder this supposed value has always been defended selectively, to protect specific geopolitical interests and ruin all others. This phenomenon has been identified in many places not only by Israeli intelligence, but also by researchers in the fields of Economic Law, Political Sociology and Critical Theory.
PJN - Is there today an "industry" in the fight against corruption, in the traditional productive sense?
DG - Absolutely. The proliferation of laws, structures and bodies dedicated to fighting corruption is shocking, with a vast ecosystem of professionals who gravitate around this phenomenon. International organizations produce constant reports to pressure states and the media to create more regulation and surveillance. There is no easier way for someone to project themselves into a successful career, no matter how mediocre he may be. A mere rant – insulting someone as corrupt is enough to achieve "results", audiences, and career promotions. Legions of police in jeans are thrown into the street in search of any handful of poorly explained coins or to compile rumors. The basic social life of buying for two to sell for three has been practically criminalized or potentially taken as suspect as long as one gets over mediocrity a little. The man who tried to eat part of the cake of the "market" of transnational corporations would himself be the "failure in the system".
PJN - Can all this not result in the destruction of the free market, the production chains and the economy?
DG - The economic recession is the result, but there is something much worse. The modern fight against financial corruption, often reduced to the offer of a box of sea bass, trivializes the really serious crimes in the collective conscience (blood crimes and treason to the homeland), covers up the destruction of moral values and the permanent dumbing down of peoples, entertaining them with idle talk and making them totally incapable of perceiving the real dangers.
PJN - Is the damage caused by the modern fight against economic corruption more serious than the minor crimes that the system swears exist?
DG - It is a disgrace. The institutional abuses practiced in the modern model of fighting corruption trample everything that Civilization has conquered for millennia, from the fairness of persecution to the precise definition of punitive laws. The constitutional guarantees of the persecuted become a joke. They do not even understand why they are persecuted and, much less, why there is so much fuss promoted by the system in weight, its newspapers, its politicians and its courts.
PJN - Do you think that Jewish communities can be affected by this fever that claims to fight corruption?
DG - It is a weapon of war. The rejection of significant Jewish realities, along with the lack of criminal clarity, generates risks of state interference in Jewish communities and in individual innocuous behavior. The extreme amplitude, vagueness and lack of typicity of this type of "crime" generates a chaotic social environment in which no one is safe. The logic of the fight against corruption in the private sector is to place the State as the arbiter of what is good or bad for companies or associations, or what their principles should be, their suppliers, or even the merit or quality of the members of the associative unit under scrutiny. All this allows for "investigations" based on anonymous complaints, grudges, or revenge. Looking for culprits, and hating Jewish life, the state assumes that all communal life can be bribery and theft, as they imply supposed future or potential "advantages". Therefore, for people to be persecuted, it is enough to exist and work, because everything will be interpreted as being any kind of trafficking. In inquisitorial times we experienced this kind of mentality too focused on surveillance, denunciation and possible sanctions, which always created a social environment of distrust towards any successful Jewish enterprise, damaging the future of the country itself.
PJN - Isn't it paradoxical that a corrupt culture of state cronyism obsessively persecutes any citizen, company or community for alleged and abstract private cronyism that in any case would never have the gravity of the former?
DG - The question implies the answer. Of course it is paradoxical. The citizen or the institution that has the misfortune of being entangled in this cursed mesh has its reputation murdered in the eyes of public opinion. Nobody apologizes to them.
PJN - Is the selective use of research for political purposes beginning to be more than documented in many countries?
DG - This is the shameful pattern. Finding a case that breaks the rule is starting to be a rarity. The idea stuck to people's brains that corruption always involves politicians and that the squandering of public resources is far from encompassing the fullness of the legal concept. The fight against corruption in the private sector is an instrument for financial elites, with political influence, to eliminate competitors or new players who may confront established corporations and that the system swears have greater compliance capacity. A few years ago, in Portugal, a French Jewish billionaire acquired a telecommunications group and expressed his desire to acquire a media group. The system panicked, retreated into meetings, and only calmed down when the good name of the company in question was severely damaged because of a collection of "criminal" cases that were mixed with hundreds of news stories.
PJN - Does this mean that in practice the entry of new actors or the rise of new financial elites operating independently is prohibited from the beginning?
DG - New competitors have to be allowed within the framework established by the dominant mainstream, which calls its own rules and dynamics "fair competition" and "market integrity". The desired "ethics" is not born from the nature of things, but from the desire that economic elites write down through their servants in politics. Alternative models of economic development are labeled, they and their agents, as corrupt, so as not to interfere with the existing chessboard. Combat is always instrumentalized to target specific opponents, spare allies, and alter the balance of power. There is nothing better than the word corruption to discredit opponents by the corporate press, to create barriers to entry for new competitors by opaque laws, and even to persecute them for confiscation and imprisonment by judicial authorities.
PJN - Is there structural corruption in the system?
DG - The fight against corruption is often a form of corruption in itself, either because the system forgets the rules of the separation of powers and the need for precise punitive laws, or because it tries to shoot down its ideological opponents through newspaper covers and police visits, all controlled in real time by politicians and oligarchs interested in the outcome of the case. The group that is in power in a country uses this struggle to "govern", that is, to destroy the groups or individuals with whom it does not share. In this context, talking about "legality" or "human rights" is a kind of black humor.
PJN - What is criminal law like in the midst of all this?
DG - Twenty years ago, I was a lawyer for a police inspector who was accused of having received an Easter egg. I started the trial by asking the judges if they wanted to taste the almonds, because they were quite tasty. The ancient circus of Rome is now made in courtrooms, but instead of tigers roaming the room, there are chocolate eggs and other minutiae associated with the old etiquette of social relations. Criminal law has become a kind of bastard morality, created in more or less secret parasitic clubs where legislators, researchers and decision-makers swarm. The bag of corruption takes the form of the object that is placed inside. If a wallet with money is found, this is the advantage. Otherwise, the advantage may be a Swiss cheese that is inside the target's refrigerator. If cheese does not exist, one will find some communication that, multiplied with dozens of others, can suggest some promise for the 22nd or even 23rd century. It has reached this point of absurdity and madness.
PJN - Are the investigators and judges aware of the game?
DG - There may be exceptions, but as a rule they do not have enough intellectual dimension to know which board they are working on. Vanity and possible career advancement are factors that can also weigh on them. Those who scrutinize public morality are transformed by the system into a kind of moralistic references, like the ancient Jesuits or even the inquisitors.
PJN - Have you lost your taste for the Law?
DG - I was once passionate about the philosophy of law, perhaps because in my youth I appreciated two relatives who were judges at the Supreme Court of Justice and at the Court of Appeal of Porto. Roseira Figueiredo and Luciano Cruz knew the Civil, Criminal, Administrative, and Commercial Codes by heart, because they graduated in law at a time when all national legislation was concentrated in a single systematized body of rules. They were intellectuals and decided in conscience. There was no internet, there were no persecutory fashions, politicians did not interfere in the justice system, and there was no ideologically militant press that moved them in a certain direction. That is the past. Things have changed a lot. Today we can already find judges saying that crazy anonymous letters are enough to break into a synagogue and steal everything in it. If I had gone back two decades, I would have had a different attitude towards the candidates for the judiciary who appeared in front of me when I was part of the juries at the Center for Judicial Studies.
PJN - Has the word ‘corrupt’ become an insult in the modern world?
DG - Clearly. If we go back five centuries, the main insults were words like excrement, bastard or coward. Today, the word corrupt has become the worst insult. Politicians are always calling each other corrupt. Newspapers do not go a single day without printing the word corruption. The sin of the mouth became a way of life. What Judaism calls garbage, leprosy, and slander have become professions that are held in high regard in totally aimless nations. A curious situation, involving confetti, balloons and clowns, happened to me personally some years ago, when I was accused on all the television stations and in the corridors of power as being associated with a case of alleged “corruption”. I had to put up with a crowd of corrupt people screaming at the same time, all claiming that I had a scheme with registry offices and millionaires. The case died on the first day, due to technical impossibility. I don't know any registry offices, I don't need the State to explain to me what my beliefs are, and if one day a millionaire appeared to me with his hands full of coins, he would have been thrown off my balcony. Note that I used to work on the seventh floor of a building.
PJN - Is it not up to the Jewish communities to inform states that the moral corruption of a nation leads to its destruction and the decline of society?
DG - That is an excellent question. We once wrote to the Minister of Justice saying that either the laws begin to define what is an indictment of crime, or the country will sink. Recall the classic example of mankind's moral corruption before the Flood, where the earth was full of injustice and sexual perverts. What do we see today if not that? A few days ago, when the religious service in the central synagogue ended, I was in the library consulting two books that I needed. I looked at the paintings on display, I remembered the museums, the men's choir, the movie theaters, the cemetery, the Chabad Centre in Cascais, and so many other things. Jewish ethics do not force anyone into misery but rather emphasize the need to work and produce to contribute to Creation. It would be wrong to waste this existence, to let Judeo-Christian Civilization die, and, finally, to reject the commandments of universal rationality that sees everything, hears everything, rewards everything and punishes everything.
