It is a great honour to deliver the 2025 B’nai B’rith Human Rights Oration.

I have had a long and fond asso­ci­ation with this organ­isa­tion, both in Australia and through­out the world. When I first joined the ECAJ in a junior role back in 2012, B’nai B’rith saw that I had something to say and something to con­trib­ute and gave me the platform to do so. I’ll always remember that.

And I reserve par­tic­u­lar admir­a­tion for organ­isa­tions with history, those which have proven their value and shown their character over many years. B’nai B’rith has 181 years of history and all of the anguish and achieve­ment that we have been asso­ci­ated with in that time is punc­tu­ated by the service and the actions of Bnai Brith. Housing orphans from the American Civil War. Founding the Anti-Defam­a­tion League following the Leo Frank blood libel. Advoc­at­ing for the freedom of Soviet Jewish families like mine.

And B’nai B’rith has always under­stood with perfect clarity that the fight for Israel, the fight for Zionism is not about Knesset factions or the policies of the day, it is the fight for Jewish human rights. That one cannot defend Jewish human rights without sup­port­ing our right to live as a free people in our own land.

I deliver this oration exactly 18 months from the October 7 attacks. So much needless loss and misery. Israel was dealt a sickening blow on October 7. The limits of its tech­no­logy and its legendary intel­li­gence were ruth­lessly exposed.

The pain and shock of those attacks will not stay in that moment. It pen­et­rated the psyche and will live with the people and the nation in the same way that the pogroms of eastern Europe tormented and con­di­tioned the Jews for gen­er­a­tions after.

But today, through the sacrifice of the men and women of the IDF, Israel is emerging with the greatest advantage over its enemies it has ever had.

Hamas is decimated. Its ability to wage war is either per­man­ently neut­ral­ised or at least pushed back by many years.

The demon­stra­tions against it in the streets of Gaza, unthink­able for the 19 years of its dic­tat­ori­al rule, are testament to its severely degraded state and its inability to maintain domestic power let alone project it outward.

The Iranian regime is at its lowest point. Its isolation in the region spec­tac­u­larly demon­strated by an alliance of the US-Saudi Arabia-Jordan and Israel which together repelled their ballistic missile strikes on Israel.

Hezbollah is battered and humi­li­ated and its fig­ure­head, long believed beyond reach, is dead. The Assad dynasty in Syria is no more and the country is in chaos.

A Trump White House will bring short-term alignment on some matters of policy – oppos­i­tion to uni­ver­sity encamp­ments that have glorified violence and menaced Jewish students, the necessary defunding of UNRWA, a com­mit­ment to backing Israel at the United Nations, and a will­ing­ness to consider paths to peace beyond tired and disproven paradigms about uni­lat­er­al recog­ni­tion of a Palestini­an state.

But Trump will surely also accel­er­ate the collapse of bipar­tis­an support for Israel, given that anything that he closely supports is imme­di­ately rendered incapable of being a consensus issue.

At home, we stand on the cusp of a federal election, which I believe will be the most fateful our community has ever exper­i­enced. It will be the first where large numbers of Aus­trali­an Jews will vote on the basis of which party can best keep Aus­trali­an Jews safe and which party will continue to view Israel as an ally.

All of these events and forces, global and domestic, have once again thrust the Jews into the centre of the world’s focus.

News and com­ment­ary about Israel, antisemitism, Jewish life, Zionism has been front page news for 18 months, unpre­ced­en­ted in Australia.

Here and around the world, the Jewish question is on the agenda once again.

There is a reason why the Israeli-Palestini­an Conflict ignites our streets, cultural insti­tu­tions, campuses and work­places like no other issue.

And it has nothing to do with loss of life or civilian cas­u­al­ties. The Russia-Ukraine war, wars in Yemen and Syria have been far deadlier.

It has nothing to do with geo­pol­it­ic­al import­ance. The notion that solving the Arab-Israeli conflict is central to achieving regional or even world peace has long been dis­cred­ited.

The rise of ISIS, the com­pet­i­tion between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the tribal and sectarian rivalries that have ensnared Syria, Iraq and Yemen, have precisely nothing to do with the presence of a tiny Jewish homeland on the edge of the Medi­ter­ranean Sea.

As Morocco’s King Hassan II observed, “rejection of Israel is the Muslim world’s most powerful aph­ro­dis­i­ac.” It is an article of faith, a rallying cry but it has no bearing on the chaotic relations, interests and griev­ances within the Arab world.

The reason why the Palestini­ans matter so much to those with no con­nec­tion to them and no great under­stand­ing of them, was best explained by the Palestini­an poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

“The interest in the Palestini­ans stems from the interest in the Jewish question. The interest is in the Jews, not in the Palestini­ans,” he said.

“The Palestini­ans have the good fortune of having Israel as their enemy because the Jews are the centre of attention. And the Jews have brought the Palestini­ans both defeat and renown.”

Darwish was right. It is only when the lives of Palestini­ans collide with the Jews that there is interest in them, because by observing this inter­ac­tion, the world is able to draw infer­ences about the nature of the Jewish enigma and come closer to solving the Jewish question.

Their per­se­cu­tion by the Assad regime, their star­va­tion in Yarmouk, their dis­crim­in­a­tion in Lebanon and Kuwait has never concerned anyone beyond the victim them­selves because there were no Jews in the equation.

Those in Gaza, who finally march against Hamas, an organ­isa­tion that has brought them only squalor and ruin, might expect the well-organised and funded campaign that calls itself “pro-Palestini­an” to throw its weight and influence behind their brave stand for a better future. They will get nothing.

This is because sup­port­ing ordinary Palestini­ans against Hamas would require them to admit that Hamas is at least partly respons­ible for the suffering of Palestini­ans.

This strikes at the very core of pro-Palestini­an pro­pa­ganda, which contends that Israel and its sup­port­ers in the West are the root of all evil, and res­ist­ance to it by Palestini­ans, no matter how barbaric or self-defeating, is therefore justified.

The other incon­veni­ence arising from the protests in Gaza is that they clearly show that Israel’s determ­ined and suc­cess­ful con­front­a­tion with Hamas is what has given Palestini­ans the freedom to march in their own streets and chant their own slogans. In other words, Israeli force and sacrifice is the only thing that has afforded Palestini­ans freedoms their own leaders have never entrusted them with.

A further feature of the fixation on the Jewish question, is the focus on Zionism, a national movement which achieved its primary goal of an inde­pend­ent Jewish state, nearly eight decades ago, yet is still a source of intrigue and often revulsion.

The fact that non-Jewish Aus­trali­ans in 2025 would define their politics or ideology by reference to the Jewish national movement and use the term, “anti-Zionist” as a common descriptor, is remark­able yet com­pletely in keeping with Darwish’s obser­va­tions.

In the theories of the Zionist thinker, Leo Pinsker we find the clearest explan­a­tion of why the Jews have always been subjected to this peculiar treatment.

Pinsker was convinced that Jews were not hated because of their religious beliefs or on any social or racial grounds. Rather, it stemmed from the unique position in which the Jews had found them­selves. Their abnor­mal­ity incited abnormal responses.

They had lost their original homeland but continued to exist as a nation in spirit, and did so living every­where but nowhere in the right place.

This gave rise to what Pinsker called, “Judeo­pho­bia”, which he described not as a typical prejudice but as a sort of fear of ghosts.

“The world”, explains Pinsker, “saw in this people the sinister figure of a ghost-like appar­i­tion of a wandering corpse, a people without unity and structure, without land or other ties, who is no longer living, yet still walking among the living; could not help but generate a peculiar, strange impres­sion in the ima­gin­a­tions of the nations.”

Pinsker realised that it didn’t matter how the Jews behaved or how much they con­trib­uted. They were feared because they could not be placed. They could not be made sense of.

In Poland for example, they lived for a thousand years, grew to 10% of the pop­u­la­tion yet they were not Poles. They prayed to a different God, observed their own calendar, cel­eb­rated their own holidays, pushed away the foods of the host. As Stalin said of the Jews, “you can’t eat with them, and you can’t drink with them.”

What did they want? To whom were they loyal? How did they get here? By what fiendish designs did they survive Egypt, Rome, Greece and Babylon?

Napoleon was so perplexed by this people that he convened a Council of Jewish Notables, made up of a hundred Jewish elders and posed twelve questions to them to figure out just what on earth they were and what they might do if he granted them enhanced rights.

Mark Twain observed this same quality of immor­al­ity. In Harper’s Magazine in March 1898, he wrote:

“The Jew has made a mar­vel­lous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. The Egyptian, the Baby­lo­ni­an, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains.”

Twain viewed Jews favour­ably but still as an enigma endowed with super­nat­ur­al qualities.

The Jews were not hated because of myths about abducting and torturing Christian children or gathering in cemeter­ies to plot the downfall of humanity.

The feelings of hatred came first. The stories were simply man­u­fac­tured after the fact to ration­al­ise the hatred, justify the abom­in­a­tions of antisemitism and recruit others into it.

Consider the stories that accompany the Jews. Poisoners of Mohammed. Betrayers of Christ. Abductors of children. Nocturnal schemers. This is no common racism.

In time, those who sought to rid society of Jews were able to turn the Jews into precisely that which their myths and spook stories said they were, to prove their point.

Pope Innocent III said the Jews “are consigned to perpetual slavery”. Peter the Venerable said that God wishes for them “a life worse than death.”

God had not consigned the Jews to perpetual slavery or given them a life worse than death. It was the laws of man that did this.

Laws that confined Jews to ghettoes, pro­hib­ited them from con­tinu­ing as merchants and craftsmen, banned them from obtaining academic degrees or attending banquets and fest­iv­it­ies, as the Council of Basel decreed in 1434.

This impov­er­ished them. Degraded them. Isolated them. Thereby proving the slander about them being a loathsome and degen­er­ate people who had lost the favour of God. This in turn justified ever more measures and indig­nit­ies against them.

The Nazis of course perfected this self-ful­filling per­ver­sion. They char­ac­ter­ised ordinary people living ordinary lives in town and cities as vermin and then starved and sickened them to turn them into the wretched, diseased nation they said they were, jus­ti­fy­ing their mass destruc­tion appro­pri­ately carried out with a common pesticide.

The Zionist leaders logically theorised that if the source of all this hatred was the peculiar Jewish condition of having no centre, no homeland, no living roots, the answer would be to give them that which they lacked, that which made them different, a homeland.

As Thomas Jefferson observed, “what is most valuable to man, is the right to self-govern.” By attaining this right for the Jews, it followed that they would take on the same value as other nations.

But the Zionist leaders were wrong in one critical respect. They thought that giving the Jews their own state would extin­guish this irra­tion­al con­cep­tion of them and endow the Jews with that quality they needed to no longer be feared and hated: Ordin­ar­i­ness.

But this failed for two reasons. Firstly, the con­cep­tion of the Jews shaped and rein­forced over thousands of years of national tra­di­tions, fables, art, liturgy and popular culture could not be undone.

Secondly, the Holocaust and Israel’s rebirth did not finally show Jews to be ordinary, “fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as” every other nation.

It proved the very opposite.

Why else would the most elaborate human enter­prise ever devised, be for the sole purpose of exterm­in­at­ing them? And how else could they survive this, pick up what was left, and proclaim their homeland within thirty-six months of lib­er­a­tion?

They just proved Twain’s view of their immor­tal­ity. Or the antisemite’s view of their ghost­li­ness.

Once the sympathy for the greatest crime ever committed pre­dict­ably and quickly dis­sip­ated, the world would again see the Jews as an irritant, a riddle, a problem to be solved.

Why? Because there is nothing normal about us and everyone can see that.

Mono­the­ism was not normal. To believe in a single, all-powerful, ever-present divinity that demands we adhere to a strict moral code and ethical standard of living was not normal. It was a revolu­tion.

To march out of bondage in Egypt as a free people and a distinct nation was not normal. No one else did that.

It is not normal to have your homeland taken from you and renamed to show you it is no longer yours, be dragged off into every corner of the world, and still cling to your culture, tra­di­tions and memories under unbear­able duress for two millennia, and survive as a people.

Not only survive, but often out­per­form despite every dis­ad­vant­age, making yourself indis­pens­able to kings and sultans, riding the tide of enlight­en­ment, standing at the head of every sig­ni­fic­ant human trans­form­a­tion from socialism to nuclear fission from psy­cho­ana­lys­is to motion pictures. There is nothing remotely normal in this.

And there is something uniquely subnormal in being plucked out, marked, plundered, humi­li­ated, herded and murdered in our millions in human abattoirs. And then to ordain a new Jewish State, fight off the invading armies not of hordes or militias but the standing armies of seven states, and emerge with the most powerful, innov­at­ive and pro­gress­ive country the Middle East has ever seen.

This all leads me to several con­clu­sions.

The first is that antisemitism is incurable. After thousands of years, it can no longer be char­ac­ter­ised as a defect in reasoning that can be untaught. We are not ordinary. And we therefore have to accept the feelings this invokes in others.

The second is that if one of the stated aims of Zionism was to, as Pinsker said, create a “new con­scious­ness that Jews are a nation like all other nations,” Zionism failed in this respect.

But this failure, the perennial abnor­mal­ity of the Jews, and the incur­ab­il­ity of antisemitism means that a sovereign Jewish homeland capable of ingath­er­ing and shel­ter­ing Jews at any time, capable of safe­guard­ing Jewish sci­entif­ic and cultural achieve­ments, capable of giving the Jews of Melbourne and Montreal somewhere to gaze out onto when mis­for­tune strikes, is a non-nego­ti­able.

It is the only true guarantor of Jewish human rights and of the foremost human right – the right to live.

When someone opposes Zionism they are not opposing the gov­ern­ment of the State of Israel, or any of its policies, nor are they express­ing solid­ar­ity with those they perceive to be harmed by the State or its policies.

They are opposing, whether they realise it or not, something essential to being Jewish. The recog­ni­tion of the Jews as a national group. The right of those people to equality. The right of those people to survive in a world that routinely slanders, dis­pos­sesses and destroys them.

This is why gen­er­a­tions of Jews have felt a con­nec­tion to the Zionist project. It has nothing to do with political parties or the politi­cians of the day. It is immeas­ur­ably greater and deeper than that. It is a con­nec­tion to the Jewish story and to our basic rights. This is why Zionism is the idea that unifies the Jewish people more than any other.

And if someone declares them­selves the enemy of what Zionism is and what it means; they’re going to have to come and take those rights because we will never surrender them.

This is why when we hear chants in the streets of this city that “all Zionists are ter­ror­ists,” we know it is the defam­a­tion of our people and the desire to strip us of our rights.

We see the same thing when Randa Abdel Fatah, the Macquarie Uni­ver­sity academic, uses her publicly-funded platform to declare “if you are a Zionist, you have no right or claim to cultural safety.” In other words, we should expect to be endangered.

And we see this when David Miller, who taught at Bristol Uni­ver­sity, takes the next logical step and proclaims: “There are Zionists every­where. In every town and city. Find out where they are.”

What then does all this mean for the fight against antisemitism. If antisemitism is a disease with no cure, why fight it at all? If it has been embedded in the human con­scious­ness over thousands of years, why would a little education dislodge it?

We may not be able to eradicate antisemitism fully but if we do not effect­ively manage it through advocacy and education, it will pose a constant threat to our lives and to our way of life.

As we have seen, when left uncon­trolled, Jewish artists, writers and musicians are deprived of the ability to create and do what they must do, which is to share their work and their talent.

It means that Jewish high school students will feel they have no place outside the Jewish school system, which in turn dimin­ishes contact between Jews and non-Jews leading to even greater animosity and distrust.

It means that Jewish uni­ver­sity students will again be urged to remain off their campuses or retreat into safe rooms.

It means that each time a Jew steps out onto the city streets in a kippa or with a Star of David, it will be an act of defiance rather than a humble show of faith.

If this becomes the norm, and it has already been the norm for 18 months, it will mean that Jews alter their beha­viours, their pro­fes­sion­al decisions, their social inter­ac­tions in a way that may be imper­cept­ible at first but will even­tu­ally lead to a radical shift in Jewish-non-Jewish relations in this country.

We will backslide into a time when Jews were sequestered in Jewish law firms, Jewish social clubs and Jewish galleries and pub­lish­ers, not as a choice to enhance con­tinu­ity and preserve identity, but from fear and exclusion.

The Jewish con­tri­bu­tion to wider society, which has enorm­ously enhanced the culture, science and wealth of the nations, will be severely reduced. As will our oppor­tun­ity to be defined and under­stood by who we really are and not by folktales and dis­in­form­a­tion of men­dacious online influ­en­cers.

Then we will find ourselves in a spiral that we can no longer exit.

There is of course a positive dividend to everything we have been living through which is the renewal of Jewish pride and asso­ci­ation which bodes well for con­tinu­ity.

But we need to find a way to manage antisemitism so that Jews can feel proud without feeling imper­illed.

If we fail in this, Jews will be forced to choose between their Jew­ish­ness and other parts of their identity, as pro­gress­ives or artists for example, and the result will be dis­con­tinu­ity and loss.

This is why education on the nature of antisemitism, spe­cific­ally con­front­ing the mythology and con­spir­acy theories through which it is all trans­mit­ted, is so vital.

Equally, we must deepen the engage­ment with the non-Jewish world. There are two competing concepts of the Jew. The real Jew, as they are and the myth­o­lo­gic­al Jew.

The myth­o­lo­gic­al Jew and the real Jew cannot coexist in the same space. Wherever the real Jew is absent, the myth will be presented in all its scheming, bloodthirsti­ness and arrogance. But where real Jews enter, you and me, the myth falls away.

The past 18 months have shown me something else.

When we exper­i­enced October 7, we felt the panic of our vul­ner­ab­il­ity, anger at our loneli­ness. We felt what it meant to have a cosmic injustice delivered against us and then have that com­poun­ded through cel­eb­ra­tions and denials, as it has always been.

But we also witnessed how it is that we survive. Through kindness. Through strength. Through personal respons­ib­il­ity.

In these 18 months, I have spoken to and listened to more members of our community than perhaps in the entire 40 years that preceded it.

And through the endless days and nights of work, this community, this family of families, has replen­ished my soul, and filled my heart with love and admir­a­tion.

Most of all, it has brought me pride at belonging to something eternal and, yes, something utterly abnormal.

We are a stat­ist­ic­al anomaly. Our being here today as Jews, as the legacy of thousands of years of adventure and turmoil, upholding the same truths, the same faith, the same tradition despite so many attempts to change or erase us, is so unlikely that it must make us marvel at the workings of the universe and of the Almighty.

And this surely is the secret to our survival. We know we have been given a rare gift.

Something so uncommon, so mean­ing­ful that it is worth all the struggle, the attention, the burden.

Because to hold onto what we are and teach it to our children is the highest form of res­ist­ance and the greatest victory.