I deliver this oration exactly 18 months from the October 7 attacks. Israel was dealt a sickening blow on October 7. The limits of its technology and its legendary intelligence were ruthlessly exposed.
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.
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 us safe and which party will continue to view Israel as an ally.
These events and forces, global and domestic, have once again thrust the Jews into the centre of the world’s focus.
The Jewish question is on the agenda once again.
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.”
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.
A 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.
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.
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 per cent 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 once 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 12 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 immortality. “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.
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.
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.
This failed for two reasons. First, 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.
Second, 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 36 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. 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 slaughtered 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.
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.
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.
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 kippah 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 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.
The past 18 months have shown me something else.
On October 7, we experienced a cosmic injustice which was 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.
Because to hold onto what we are and teach it to our children is the highest form of resistance and the greatest victory.
This is an edited extract of the annual
B’nai B’rith Human Rights Oration delivered in Melbourne last Sunday by Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who received the 2025 B’nai B’rith Human Rights Award. To read Ryvchin’s full speech, visit www.ecaj.org.au.
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