Lapid’s message: after the Shoah, no Jew can be a bystander to any form of racism

COLIN SHINDLER: The foreign minister's antisemitism speech was a rebuke to Netanyahu's view that the primary concern of all Jews should be 'Israel First'

'ANTISEMITISM ISN'T THE first name of hate, it's the family name'. So spoke Israel's Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid at last week's 'Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism' in Jerusalem.

Lapid went on to say that the term 'antisemitism' applied to 'anyone who hates so much that they want to kill, eliminate, persecute and expel people just because they are different.'.

He cited the Rwandan massacre of 1994 and the Islamist atrocities of ISIS and Boko Haram as examples of such a virulent obsession.

This broader perception of antisemitism, however, provoked anger and opprobrium from the nationalist Right in Israel, voiced by Lapid's bitter opponent, the former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet Lapid is no dyed-in-the-wool Leftist, as is evidenced by his standard, unthinking response this week to the somewhat cack-handed decision by Ben and Jerry to refuse to sell their ice cream in the occupied territories. It was “a shameful capitulation to antisemitism, BDS, and everything bad in the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish discourse,” Lapid commented.

Netanyahu, who is now in the throes of a sulphurous campaign to demonstrate that the premiership was stolen from him, and that Bennett and Lapid are merely temporary occupants of high office, believes that 'Israel First' should be the primary concern of all Jews. In his view, the very idea of 'Israel as a light unto the nations' should be relegated to way down the ladder of priorities.

In contrast, Lapid argues that a polarisation between these two sets of outlooks is never the solution. He instead expounds an approach that integrates both in a symbiotic relationship.