Filed with Sources, Books & Media (MOC) · Related: 60.1 Israel-Palestine · Key Arguments (MOC)
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great pleasure to be here. I’ll be brief.
I’ve spent most of the months since the 7th of October in Israel and Gaza and have seen as much of the conflict as I think it’s possible for a non-combatant to see. I went to all of the massacre sites when they were still fresh and have spent a lot of time with the survivors, families of the hostages. I’ve been in the morgues of Tel Aviv where they’re still trying to identify the dead. One young man’s body was only identified yesterday. Think what it takes, what you have to do to a man to make his body unidentifiable for eight months.
One of the things that struck me most after the 7th of October was when I was at one of the reunions of the Nova party. These are all young people who’d seen their friends raped and murdered in front of them. One young man, a survivor, showed me footage from his phone, which included footage of a young friend of his who didn’t make it into his car and was lynched by a mob immediately afterwards. This young man, this survivor, said to me, “What would you do if this happened in your country?”
I thought, though I didn’t say, that it has happened in my society, in my Europe, in my West. The scale may be different, but the terrorists are the same. It happened here in Paris at the Bataclan. It happened in Manchester where 22 young girls were blown up for the crime of going to a pop concert. It happened at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. The scale was different, but the perpetrators are all the same. They’re always the same people who, whether in Toulouse or Porte de Vincennes in Copenhagen or Mumbai, can never restrain themselves from targeting the Jews.
Yet, the sympathy of so many people here in Europe since the 7th has not been on the side of the victims but on the side of the perpetrators. Too many people mistake the victim for the oppressor, the underdog for the overdog, and those who fight terrorism for those who dream of it and bring up their children to love it from the cradle.
Consider this: in every European capital, as well as in America, photographs of the Israeli hostages still in captivity by Hamas have been put up. And in every city outside of Israel, they have been torn down. Think about that for a moment. If someone in London or Paris loses their dog, they will put up a poster asking people to help find them. And if even one person in our society went around tearing down such a poster, we would ask what had happened in our society. We would ask why we were producing people so pathological. We would want to find the person and punish them.
Yet, when the missing are Jewish children, or Jewish women, or Jewish men—because there’s no crime in being a man either—these posters are torn down. One of the relatives of the abducted children held in captivity told me recently that he saw posters of his one-year-old relative torn down in the center of Dublin.
One other consideration: we have all for years heard the feminists issue a call on male sexual violence against women, “Believe all women.” But where was the solidarity? Where was the sympathy or even belief when the women were Jews? The belief evaporates. And I won’t even go into the psychopathology and suicidalism of queers for Palestine, who are a branch of turkeys for Christmas.
It was Hamas that started this war, yet much of the world has forgotten this. They’ve been fooled by Hamas propaganda into imagining that Israel is the aggressor. Having seen this war up close, I can tell you with 100% certainty that the war would be over tomorrow, not just if Hamas returned the Jewish hostages, but if the Palestinians in Gaza brought up their children not to hate, but to love—not to aspire to a cult of death, but to join Israel in a belief in life—not to believe in destroying a state, but to put their energies into building one.
Each era has its anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is famously a shape-shifting virus. Sometimes in the past, people hated Jews for their religion. Then you couldn’t hate people for their religion, so people hated the Jews for their race. Then when you weren’t allowed to hate people for their race anymore, you could hate the Jews for having and defending a state. This is the eternal challenge for the Jewish people. Gregor von Rezzori, among others, showed us this. It’s their challenge to be hated for being poor and for being rich, for being integrated and for not integrating, for being stateless—remember “rootless cosmopolitans”—and also to be hated for having a state.
But this is not only a challenge for the Jews. It’s a challenge for all of us. As Vasily Grossman wrote in the dead center of his masterpiece “Life and Fate,” and I quote, “Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end. It is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
Today in Europe, this ancient hatred can come from the left and the right. We have to be alert to it and stand up to it whichever direction it comes from, because among much else, everybody knows that anti-Semitism is an early warning sign. When a society starts to indulge in this lurid, paranoid fantasy, every other hatred comes next. We in Europe have a special debt to history and memory and a special debt to the Jews—not just because of what they suffered on our continent, but because of the richness of culture, learning, and faith that Jews have brought to our civilization.
I say this at my most frank and deepest—the deepest theological and philosophical levels. Our civilization could not exist without the Jewish people. But I want to end with one piece of good news. While much of Europe and the West—from the left, from the right, from the religious to the atheists—are indulging in this ancient hatred, Israel is showing another way. It’s showing how Arab, Jew, Druze, Muslim, Christians, and others can live together and fight together.
In recent months, I’ve met heroic Muslim doctors on the front line, heroic Druze fighters among many others in Israel. As one brave young Druze fighter said to me recently, “I think Hamas hate us even more than they hate the Jews.” Israel knows what it is fighting for, and it knows that it’s fighting not just for its survival, but the survival of all of us. When Israel is attacked, it stands up for itself. When Israelis are most barbarously assaulted, they don’t fidget and wonder what to do—they fight.
Because—and I’ll finish on this—whether in Spain in the 15th century, Europe in the 20th century, or the Arab world for many centuries, the situation of the Jews has always been at its most perilous when Jews are prominent and weak. Since a lack of prominence does not seem possible to the Jewish people, thank God that leaves only one option: prominent and strong. And it should be not only Israel that follows that model, but us too—prominent, strong, united, and resolute.
Thank you.