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.