Emmanuel Navon

Last year, ransomware forced Asahi to suspend domestic orders and shipments. An attack on digital systems disrupted the physical economy. Recent Japanese reports of AI-enabled attacks underline how quickly this threat is evolving.

Cybersecurity is now part of the defence of freedom. Let me make three arguments.

First, democracies are prime targets of cyber aggression.

Microsoft’s 2026 report places Israel second and Japan fourth in its sample of observed nation-state cyber activity. It recorded 210 events against Israel and 172 against Japan.

Peer-reviewed research covering 2008 to 2016 recorded roughly five times as many weekly denial-of-service attacks against domestic hosts in democracies as in autocracies. The European Central Bank finds that a small cluster of countries, often authoritarian, accounts for most recorded state-sponsored attacks.

Microsoft also finds that governments accounted for 27 percent of observed threat activity, up from 17 percent the previous year.

These attacks threaten essential services and sovereign decisions. Japan and Israel share a strategic challenge.

Second, democratic solidarity must produce practical protection.

A compromised supplier can expose partners abroad. Warnings must reach the next potential victim in time.

Japan’s move towards active cyber defence makes cooperation especially timely. We need trusted information sharing, trained people and joint exercises that test how hospitals and factories can recover.

Such cooperation already delivers results. In 2022, America’s Treasury reported that cooperation with Israel was providing real-time threat information to help protect America’s financial sector.

Third, Israel is an indispensable partner in this common defence.

Close cooperation among academia, government, industry and defence turns operational experience into innovation.

This March, Google completed its acquisition of Israeli-founded Wiz, following a thirty-two-billion-dollar agreement. Google reports that Wiz serves half the Fortune 100. Takeda is also a customer.

According to YL Ventures, Israeli cybersecurity companies raised 5.1 billion dollars across 136 funding rounds last year. Wiz researchers also helped identify a critical vulnerability in NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure software, which NVIDIA fixed.

Japan’s industrial expertise and Israel’s cybersecurity capabilities are complementary. Partnerships are already taking shape.

Yokogawa works with Claroty on industrial cybersecurity. This month, SoftBank group distributor SB C&S announced an agreement to bring Zenity’s AI-agent security platform to Japan.

On October twenty-first, OMRON announced its venture arm’s investment in Israel’s Salvador Technologies, which develops solutions for rapidly restoring industrial systems after disruption. That addresses precisely the challenge illustrated by Asahi.

These capabilities protect the cloud, factories and the AI agents increasingly acting on our behalf.

I invite our Japanese colleagues to continue this work at Cyber Week, at Tel Aviv University, from November ninth to twelfth.

Let us deepen cooperation through joint research, faster warnings and realistic exercises. An attack on one democracy should leave every partner better prepared.

Israel already helps protect the free world’s cyberspace.

Together, we can strengthen the services our citizens depend on and the freedom our societies cherish.

Before I knew I would become Israel’s ambassador to Japan, Guy Gilboa Dallal’s parents asked us to adopt a hostage in our hearts. I chose their son. On the third anniversary of October 7, I welcomed him as a free man to the country he had dreamed of visiting. Below is the speech I delivered as ambassador at the Jewish Community of Japan in Tokyo—in memory of the Bibas family, in defiance of those who seek our destruction, and in celebration of the love and resilience that sustain the Jewish people.

My bright orange tie is neither incidental nor inappropriate. I wear it in memory of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, whose bright red hair became familiar to us all, and of their mother, Shiri.

The terrified and pleading eyes of Shiri as she was being kidnapped while holding her toddler and her baby will forever haunt me.

According to the IDF, Ariel and Kfir were murdered by terrorists with their bare hands.

Would any of us murder a baby and a four-year-old child because of a border dispute?

Would any of us behead people, rape them, burn them alive, crush their bodies, torture parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents just to extract concessions from our neighbors?

Of course not.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil.” But we must also confront the ideology that turns murder into a moral duty: the conviction that destroying the Jews will redeem the world.

Nazi propaganda had turned the Jews into the source of all evil. Therefore, killing them would make the world a better place. Sending them to gas chambers and burning their bodies became a necessary act of redemption.

Hamas has fully adopted this ideology. The Charter of Hamas describes the Jews as the source of the world’s ills, and their elimination as the only way to redeem humanity.

Here is a text found in the pocket of a Hamas terrorist on October 7: “You must sharpen the blades of your swords and be pure in your intentions before Allah. Know that the enemy is a disease that has no cure, except beheading and uprooting of the hearts and livers. Attack them!”

French author Georges Bernanos wrote that Hitler had given antisemitism a bad reputation. In truth, even this post-war shame is dying out. The very mechanism of demonization directed in the past at the Jews as a scattered people is directed at them today as a sovereign nation.

Soviet propaganda played a key role in demonizing Israel during the Cold War. It rebranded the aggressive and genocidal intentions of its Arab allies as “national liberation” and the self-determination of the indigenous Jewish people as colonialism.

The same poisonous propaganda is spreading today with Qatari money.

But since calling openly for the killing of Jews is still a hard sell in the West –at least for now— the clever trick is to say “Zionists” instead.

It is not by coincidence that we are commemorating October 7 in a synagogue. Open a prayer book and you’ll see Jerusalem under its different names – including Zion – mentioned on almost every page.

We pray for the return to Zion on a daily basis. The Jews are both a nation and a religion. Not all Jews want to make Israel their home, but the alleged distinction between Judaism and Zionism is spurious. It is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.

Jews were not the only victims of October 7, but the genocidal intentions and acts of Hamas were directed at Jews.

Including the abduction of civilians. Including your abduction, Guy. Like the rest of the hostages, you literally lived through hell. For two years.

And allow me to share a story that I kept to myself when we first met.

On the 22^nd of February 2025, Hamas sadistically filmed you and Eviatar David watching other hostages being freed while you were being kept in captivity.

A little over two months later, I attended an event in support of the hostages. It was hosted by the “Friends of Zion Museum” in the presence of Ambassador Mike Huckabee.

Your parents spoke there, with dignity, love, and pain. They screened the anime film that tells your story and your love for Japan.

They also told the audience that each of us should adopt a hostage in our hearts.

I did. I adopted you. That didn’t mean forgetting about the other hostages, of course. But it meant giving a special place in my mind and in my heart to one hostage. To you.

I had no idea at the time that I would become Israel’s ambassador to Japan.

But here we are, nearly a year and a half later, in Japan. I welcome you as a free man in the country you dreamed of before your abduction.

You are the living proof that, as King Solomon wrote in the Song of Songs, “love is as strong as death.”

The love of your family, of “Am Israel” (the Jewish people), and of many good people here in Japan has prevailed.

Here in the Land of the Rising Sun, we welcome you, Guy, as a free man.

Three years after that terrible day, the Jewish people continues to rise from tragedy.

As it says in the Book of Numbers (23:24): “Behold, a people rises like a lioness and lifts itself up like a lion” (הֶן עָם כְּלָבִיא יָקוּם וְכַאֲרִי יִתְנַשָּׂא).

The struggle is not over, and our enemies are not resting.

But your presence here tonight, Guy, gives us hope and strength.

Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, you are free at last.