4 No. 74 JUSTICE thank all those who created this opportunity to engage with the legal community, possibly the most important community in this pressing issue, especially as we witness a tsunami of antisemitism around the world — in Western Europe, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia — in the aftermath and in the response to the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. I share with you the understanding of how dangerous it is to see the law hijacked and weaponized in order to mainstream or normalize antisemitism — an ever-mutating lethal hate that has existed for thousands of years. In this case, this strain has been enabled by latching onto the guiding social construct of our time — the “secular religion” of human rights: the international rulesbased order after the Holocaust and post-World War II. It was created from the ashes of the Holocaust so that despite “Never Again,” in an Orwellian-inverted reality we are witness to “again and again,” be it in Sudan or in other parts of the world, while the international community remains silent. I share with you my analysis of how we got to the moment in which a tsunami of antisemitism emerged in response to the attack of October 7, Simchat Torah in Israel. I explore this so that we can comprehend what we need to do in order to identify and combat this evermutating lethal hate, as Professor Wistrich called it, “the oldest hatred in the world,” effectively, including using the law. I begin by analyzing how we arrived here — not just with the 1948 sort of reconstitution, formation of the State of Israel, the nation state of the Jewish People, but by looking at Jews as a prototypical indigenous people. Jews are an indigenous people because “indigeneity” means that they speak the same language (Hebrew), traverse the same land (Israel), practice the same customs and rituals, and hearken to the same God for thousands of years. That is the literal meaning of indigeneity. This indigenous people returned to an ancestral homeland after thousands of years of exile and persecution and committed themselves to equality. The Holocaust was just the most immediate or most “modern” awful event of that exile and persecution, of which we must understand the moment in which we address now the critical reclaiming of what the State of Israel is. This is Israel's vision, mission and values, anchored in our Declaration of Independence. The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People. From 1948 to 1973, we witnessed a series of wars and military campaigns between wars driven by the intent to annihilate the Jewish State — the “Jew” among the nations, if you will. Conventional wars failed one after the other, and 1975 is, for me, the first salvo of the appropriation and weaponization of the international institutions, its mechanisms, and the principles that we lawyers often refer to, in that international rules-based order with a 1975 UN Zionism as Racism Resolution. “Zionism is racism” was Soviet propaganda adopted by the UN, and it remains alive and well on university campuses in 2025, online, and on the streets. “Zionism is racism” is the initial attack of what I would call the unconventional war for hearts and minds that begins to appropriate and hijack those international institutions, mechanisms, agencies, and principles, in this sort of multi-front war. But it begins very carefully, according not just to Israel's ambassador at the UN at the time, Chaim Herzog, who ripped up the resolution, but also to Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 1975, who understood precisely where we have arrived today in a very troubling, almost prophetic speech in which he said, “If Nazism is racism and Zionism is racism, then Zionism is Nazism.” Honoring Yom HaShoah: In the Shadow of October 7* Michal Cotler-Wunsh * Edited transcript of an IJL international webinar, April 22, 2025. As Keynote Speaker, Adv. Michal Cotler-Wunsh addressed the evolving nature of antisemitism, examining its mutations over the decades and its present-day manifestations in a post-October 7 world. She shared insights from her unique role as Israel’s Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism. I
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