5 Fall 2023 Menachem Zemba, who later perished in the Warsaw ghetto, explained the words of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, “It is a known halacha that Esav hates Jacob,” and described antisemitism as a phenomenon without explanation. Midrash Lamentations Rabbah (Chapter 3, p. 200) tells about the Roman emperor Hadrianus, who suppressed the Bar Kochba rebellion, was venerated by the Romans, but who is described in our tradition as “the one whose bones should be crushed.” When a Jew passed in front of him and greeted him, Hadrianus ordered him to be killed. When another Jew passed by and saw what happened to the first, he did not greet him; the emperor also ordered him to be killed. His counselors asked him: we do not understand your actions, both the one who greeted you and the one who did not were killed. He answered them: “what, you want to tell me how I should kill my enemies?” Put simply, he had a policy to kill Jews, what did it matter what they did or did not say? One hundred and forty years ago, the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow wrote the book Eternal Hatred for the Eternal People (Hebrew), the name of which bears witness to such hatred. Nevertheless, we must not give up. The struggle is necessary, even if it achieves only partial results. It is also necessary in the wake of modern exhibitions of antisemitism that operate under the guise of reasonableness and intellectualism. For example, I watched the horror show of the three presidents of the prestigious universities: Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (whose president is Jewish). Their failure to simply say that on a basic moral level, calling for genocide against Jews is against their university’s regulations and codes of conduct, was shocking to me. Apparently, on the advice of lawyers, whether out of fear of the “progressives” in the universities or out of fear of the donors from the Arab world, the presidents shamefully twisted and turned their logic and stated that the answer “is context dependent.” There is no context in the world – whatever it may be – in which it is possible to believe that calling for genocide could be sanctioned. Viewing the testimonies given by the university presidents before Congress in Washington, D.C., I asked myself if they knew the meaning of the term “genocide.” Based on the forced tone of their words, I had the impression that they “understand” that the individual Jew on campus should not be subjected to heavy harassment. But genocide is much broader than that – it is the extermination of a people. The Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who was a Holocaust refugee from Poland, coined the term during the Holocaust and knocked on every possible door lobbying in support of a Sisyphean task: to convince his listeners of the need for an international convention to combat genocide. This week, December 9, 2023, commemorates the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations. We have already mentioned a fear of “progressive” circles. Previously, this term signified tangible progress, advancements, and developments. Today, it conceals uncontrolled hostility, ignorance, and unexplained hatred for bodies, personalities, and institutions that supposedly make up a strong ruling establishment and elite class that harm the weak. Harassment of Jews (who are supposedly part of the elite and the “powerful”) is the result of this conduct and rationale, which is built on old foundations of “classical” antisemitism. The words of the university presidents pour fuel on a fire ignited by antisemites who have raised their heads in the same way as haters of Israel have in every generation, and exploit the Palestinian struggle as a platform for refining their antisemitism. This includes the lie that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, something which is completely untrue; Israel is now dragged to The Hague International Court of Justice by South Africa. In the past, when I served as the Government Secretary from 1986-1994 in the Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin governments, I was the Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Forum for Monitoring the Phenomena of Antisemitism, which I initiated in 1987. The editor of JUSTICE, Dr. Mala Tabory was my good colleague on behalf of “Nativ,” the governmental body that deals with the Jews of the former Soviet Union and now the Commonwealth of Independent States. But Shimon Peres, the Foreign Minister at the time, always an optimist, said to me, “Ely, governments should deal with the present and the future, antisemitism is a thing of the past, why deal with it?” Subsequently, he changed his mind. In those years, we identified three forms of combat: first, the political-diplomatic route, whether through classic diplomacy vis-à-vis governments or public diplomacy, which used to be called hasbara
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