Published: 30 July 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Foreign minister says ‘if we want the world to deal with hatred of the Jews, we must enlist the Western world to give the battle against antisemitism a contemporary context’
THE JEWISH PEOPLE did not emerge from the Holocaust with a single conclusion but with two. The first conclusion is that we must survive at any price. No one will come to save us.
The second conclusion is that we must be moral people, and more than anything, our morality is assessed when the situation is not moral – during wartime, during a time of confrontation.
Too many among us are concerned that the battle against racism will commit us to a restrictive ethic of tolerance. If antisemitism is racism, Israel needs to be at the forefront of the fight against racism.
The fight against racism needs to be part of our set of considerations in choosing our friends in the world, in the way in which we deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in how we relate to the minorities living among us. We also need to lower the level of hysteria in the face of criticism.
Maybe every antisemite would oppose Israeli policy in the Gaza Strip, but not everyone who opposes Israeli policy in Gaza is an antisemite.
If we want the world to continue to deal actively with hatred of the Jews – and more than that, hatred of the Jews who live in Israel – we must emerge from our isolation.
We must enlist the Western world to stand at our side, to give the battle against antisemitism a contemporary context.
Only such an approach will permit us to enlist all those whom we have given up on in recent years: young people on American college campuses, the Western European political establishment, the liberal media, international organisations.
FULL STORY Is antisemitism racism? (Haaretz)
