"The issue of international terrorism is perhaps the most important issue today for all of humanity, for the Middle East, for the United States, and for China, but also for the Jewish people, and no less for the Arab people,” declares Adv. Shraga Biran.
This week, as U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping prepare to meet in South Korea, Biran and his team at the Institute for Structural Reforms (ISR) have sent both leaders an urgent appeal. Their message is unambiguous: the two superpowers must use their unprecedented summit to jointly declare war on global terrorism and antisemitism. For Biran, this is not a matter of diplomacy or public relations but a moral and civilizational imperative. “The difference between the absolute and the almost determines the fate of humanity," he warns.
According to Biran, Washington and Beijing have almost reached a consensus regarding the issues on the official agenda for the summit, which demonstrates the great powers’ willingness to cooperate. Now this will can be realized in regards to urgent geopolitical issues, especially the problem of terrorism in the Middle East and beyond. “If they have already solved the trade issues,” he says, “they must move to the only problem that cannot wait, the elimination of the terror that poisons the world.”
The Miracle: The Two Presidents are Preaching a Global War on Terror, Independently Using the Same Language
Biran believes that the two leaders, who together command nations producing roughly 55 percent of global output, hold the only viable key to ending the “saga that is called terror, fascist terror, and antisemitism.” Their cooperation, he argues, is not a question of choice but of responsibility: “The sheer weight of economic and moral power concentrated in Washington and Beijing imposes an absolute responsibility on them to act together. The American eagle and the Dragon can do it.”
In fact, Biran notes, both leaders are already united in the global war on terror, having independently used the same terminology to describe the evil of and the remedy for terrorism, for more than a decade. "Thus spoke the presidents," Biran says, quoting President Trump: "Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of terror, poverty, and violence, exploited by those who seek to use them as tools to promote terror and extremism. Jihadist terrorism is a wicked ideology. We believe that [the] vicious outbreak of militant antisemitism must be given no quarter, no safe harbor, no place in a civilized society.”
President Xi Jinping pledged to “crack down” on global terrorism, which China considers one of the "three evils," along with separatism and religious extremism, celebrating China’s closed gates for antisemitism of any kind. China is committed to "resolving conflicts through development," based on "the need to address the root causes and phenomena associated with terrorism."
The Institute for Structural Reforms: A “Factory” for Solutions
Few voices in Israel speak with Biran’s combination of legal authority, historical memory, and moral passion. At over ninety, the founder of the Institute for Structural Reforms has lost none of his intensity. A veteran lawyer, entrepreneur, child partisan (in General Begma’s partisan division in Ukraine), he devoted many years to developing concrete economic strategies to dismantle the structures that sustain conflict and to developing the capacity of disadvantaged populations to climb the social ladder. He formalized this work by founding the ISR in 2010, promoting structural reforms aimed at reducing socio-economic disparities in Israel. The ISR is positioning its current global appeal as an extension of its core, solution-oriented research. “Everyone knows how to lament problems,” he says. “We focus on producing solutions.”
His latest initiative, known as the Trump-Xi Summit Imperative, extends the argument of his book, Liberating Gaza: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty, Fundamentalism, and Terror (published shortly after October 7th). Now, after two years of war, with the geopolitical script flipped and terrorism in the Middle East on the verge of collapse, Biran is publishing a new book, When Eagle and Dragon Unite: A Global Alliance to Rebuild Gaza and Eradicate Terrorism Worldwide, to answer the crucial question of "What now?" specifically, how the remnants of terrorism can finally be cleansed from the Middle East and beyond. This book is therefore a call for the two great powers to execute what they have preached for so many years – to finally crack down on global terrorism. This work is a direct product of the ISR's focused research on Poverty, Fundamentalism and Terror and its study of the new geopolitics in the Middle East, lending academic depth to Biran’s thesis. In it, he defines terrorism as the final symptom of a deeper pathology, poverty feeding fundamentalism, which in turn breeds violence. “If you eliminate Hamas in Gaza,” he explains, “you have not eliminated it until you eliminate the international terrorism that continues to pull its metastases.” Local battles, he warns, cannot cure a global disease. “We have to cut the head of the snake, because his tail can quickly regrow.”
Following the announcement of the coming summit between the American and Chinese presidents, Biran has voiced his message directly to Washington and Beijing, including personal letters to President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, Special Envoy Witkoff, American Ambassador to Israel Huckabee and Jared Kushner, as well as to China’s President Xi Jinping, Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi and the Chinese Ambassador to Israel, Xiao Junzheng.
“Those who justify terrorism in the name of ideological conflicts and political disagreements,” Biran says, “are walking the same path of National Socialism under Hitler. There are no third options, even for high-minded bleeding hearts.”
Biran therefore calls on President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Sa’ar and the Government of Israel to join his call to the leaders of the two great powers, as well as to the entire Arab, Muslim and Jewish world, including the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization (WZO), Hillel International, B'nai B'rith International, Anti‑Defamation League (ADL), The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); and Israeli organizations including the Israel Economy Leaders Forum (IEL) and Manufacturers Association of Israel (MAI).
Biran describes international terrorism as “a great cancer,” a network that continues to operate even when its visible organs are destroyed. The logic of military containment, he insists, is bankrupt. “The world is paralyzed,” he says, “humanly, politically, and morally.” The result, visible in the Middle East, is a tragic repetition: “It took two years, and tens of thousands of victims on both sides, Arabs and Jews together, and still the terror survives.”
He sees terrorism as “an ideological disease caused by the psychopathology of fundamentalism that knows how to send its poisons,” manipulating impoverished populations for the gain of the powerful. “From the upper classes come those who exploit the poor popular classes, who become cannon fodder and are convinced to see death as their redemption.”
The geography of this despair, he notes, encompasses the entire Global South, around 1.4 billion people. “These are the people living in the darkness of the Middle Ages,” he says. “Seventeen years next door to us, five minutes away, they were kept there deliberately.” For Biran, the failure to confront this reality is the world’s most devastating moral negligence. The existing international framework, he reminds us, was declared by the United Nations after 9/11 but has long since fallen dormant. “The global war on terror is run today on a symbolic budget of about 350 million dollars,” he notes, “and it has not been updated for the new technologies and new forms of terror.” The void, he says, now demands leadership at the highest level.
Biran’s response to this paralysis is rooted in economics. "We are living in a new era," he says, "an era where human and artificial intelligence succeed in producing wealth." According to UN and UBS data cited by the ISR, global wealth now totals between 450-470 trillion dollars, with sixty percent of that categorized as new, intangible wealth, intellectual property, digital assets, and technological capital. “This defines the new age of humanity,” he notes, “an age that can end poverty if it chooses.” His proposal is both grounded and feasible: transferring one percent of this global wealth could eradicate poverty and, with it, the economic foundation of terror. Such a move, he argues, is not philanthropy but a realistic policy that would transform potential combatants into participants in the global economy.
Biran’s blueprint calls for the immediate establishment of an International Task Force, to be led jointly by the United States and China. This task force, he says, must launch a campaign of “de-Hamasization, denazification in the style of 2025,” building a new civil authority in Gaza based on prosperity rather than fear. The region’s natural gas reserves and its potential port linking Gaza to Aqaba could make it “port number two” of the Eastern Mediterranean, fueling economic cooperation across the Middle East.
History, he adds, has already shown what happens when despair meets inaction. “Fascism in the 1930s grew from the crisis of 1932,” he recalls. “Roosevelt in America proved that democracy could overcome despair through reform, while Europe fell to Social Nationalism, fascism and antisemitism. The same crossroads faces us now, with one gigantic difference – we are strong, and nobody can push us with our backs against the wall. All my life I’ve preached that Jews cannot allow themselves, anymore, to be pushed against the wall, and I’ve never imagined that it could happen again after May 9th, 1945, the victory day. Today, antisemitism can disappear in our new era of new wealth.”
Seizing opportunities provided by the new era and its new wealth is at the very heart of Biran’s doctrine, which he presented over the years through several books that were published in Hebrew, Chinese and English, including OPPORTUNISM: How to Change the World - One Idea at a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
Biran’s appeal also draws on the distinct moral histories of both powers. He reminds the American audience that Trump’s commitment to the fight against terrorism and antisemitism predates his family connection to Judaism. “He wrote and acted against international terrorism and against antisemitism when it was not popular,” Biran says. During his first and second terms, Trump used executive orders to combat antisemitism, penalize universities that failed to protect Jewish students and establishing a multi-agency joint task force to fight antisemitism in schools and universities, cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from uncomplying institutions. “That,” Biran insists, “was an act of moral courage.” China, for its part, occupies a unique position in his worldview. “China is a civilization where the word ’antisemitism’ does not exist in the lexicon,” he says. He recalls that during the Holocaust, Chinese cities such as Harbin and Shanghai opened their doors to 20,000 Jewish refugees, and that even today, China continues to celebrate the historic cooperation between Jews and Chinese freedom fighters. That heritage, combined with its vast investments in the new Middle East, building the largest city near Aqaba (NEOM, a project that started immediately after a successful campaign against terrorism in Saudi Arabia) and leading the development of Egypt’s new capital, makes stability in the region a strategic necessity.
Biran’s own book is being jointly published in Arabic by Jordanian publisher Mohammad Alsharqawi. It is being distributed across the Arab world, with direct publication in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Syria, which underscores the regional appetite for an economic path out of extremism. According to Biran, Alsharqawi is a “true Arab patriot” which assisted the ISR in developing a framework of how Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates could become partners in the reconstruction of Gaza and in the mission to eradicate global terrorism.
Biran contends that the vast majority of the Muslim world, comprised of more than two billion people (of whom more than 400 million are Arabs), are righteous believers who are ashamed of the gangs that stigmatize their pure belief with the stain of murderous terrorism. These gangs are an obstacle to development, progress and peace. “We must recognize,” he adds, “that global terrorism today is an enterprise led by roughly one hundred individuals who can be eliminated.”
“The enlightened world should unanimously oppose global terrorism and antisemitism.”
Across Europe and even within the United States, Biran sees echoes of the 1930s, “populist, nationalist, fascist, and even pseudo-leftist movements,” as he calls them, that exploit resentment to regain power. “Out of 195 countries, 60-70 percent are ruled by governments sustained by populism,” he says. “Fascism today no longer marches in uniform, it hides behind democratic slogans.” He warns that under the guise of modern liberalism, antisemitism and extremism are once again becoming tools of populist politics. “It is shocking,” he says, “that under the title of socialism, which once meant solidarity, we now see groups trying to sell antisemitism.”
His appeal is addressed not only to leaders but to conscience. “The Israeli universities, every president of an Israeli university with standing in the international community, should join this call, against fascism, against terrorism, against antisemitic terror.” Equally, he insists, “the Jewish people everywhere must rally behind this cause. It is inconceivable that the Jewish communities of the world, which gave so much to culture and to freedom, would not join the demand to establish an international task force here and now to fight terror and antisemitic terror together.” He rejects any notion that the decision can wait. “There is always an excuse to postpone,” he says, “but not this time. If they miss this summit, humanity will have lost a historic moment.”
For Biran, the Trump-Xi summit is not another diplomatic gathering but a test of civilization’s ability to act. “The determinism of history does not work overtime,” he says. “There is no determinism of history, there are people.”
He pauses, then adds: “If Trump and Xi understand this, if they act together now, they can bring about the first real covenant of the new world. It is now in their hands to actually do it.”
Written in collaboration with the Institute for Structural Reforms