K'vod HaNasi (Your Honour the President), K’vod Yoshev Rosh (Your Honour the Chairman), friends. We've been asked, all of us, to see into the future and I was once present when the great Bernard Lewis, the great expert on Islam, was asked just such a question. And he replied, “I am a historian and therefore, I only make predictions about the past. What is more, I am a retired historian, so even my past is passé.”
However, I want to add a few words on another dimension, hinted at at the very end of Professor Ferguson's brilliant talk. I want to talk about a phenomenon that, however serious it is now, is going to get more so in the years ahead.
And it is undoubtedly one of the most significant events of my lifetime, to me, completely unexpected. And that is the emergence, less than a lifetime after the Holocaust, of a new strain of the virus called antisemitism. And this, after the most systemic attempt in the entire history of humanity, to ensure “Never Again.”
The new antisemitism has emerged after more than 60 years of anti-racist legislation, 60 years of human rights legislation, 60 years of interfaith dialogue, after thousands of Holocaust memorials and conferences and films and books and Chairs of Holocaust Studies. None of that has stopped the new antisemitism, none of it even slowed it down at all.
And the reason is that antisemitism is a virus.
And all the anti-racist provisions constitute an immune system. And viruses defeat immune systems when they mutate. Antisemitism has mutated.
The new antisemitism is not merely a resurgence of the old. It differs from it in three respects.
Firstly, it's not aimed at Jews as individuals.
It is aimed at Jews as a nation in their land. The new antisemitism is ultimately anti-Zionism.
Second, contrary to what most of us think, it is not easy to call on people to hate. It goes against our moral sense. And therefore, when you do it, you have to appeal for justification to the highest source of authority available in the culture at the time. In the Middle Ages, the highest authority was religion. And therefore, it was the Church. And therefore, it took the form of Christian anti-Judaism.
In the 19th century, the highest authority was Science. And so antisemitism was justified by reference to two pseudo-sciences, social Darwinism, that attempted to prove that the strong survive by eliminating the weak, and the so-called scientific study of race. And the result was racial antisemitism. In the 21st century - and indeed during the whole of the post-Holocaust period - the highest authority in world culture is Human Rights.
And that is why Israel, and by implication Jews, are regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: Racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and attempted genocide.
And we now understand why the whole immune system was so easily defeated.
If you are a stupid antisemite, you deny the Holocaust. If you are a serious antisemite, you affirm the Holocaust, and you then add, who are today's Jews? The Palestinians. And who are today's Nazis? The Jews. And that is how the entire human rights culture designed to prevent a resurgence of antisemitism has become the vehicle for the new antisemitism.
Thirdly, unlike the old antisemitism that was transmitted by national cultures, the new antisemitism is transmitted by the new media of communication, internet, email, and all the social networking software - Facebook, Twitter, and so on. All of which are harder to monitor and even harder to control.
People tend to ask me nowadays, is Britain an antisemitic country? Is France an antisemitic country? That is a 20th-century question. It is not remotely a 21st-century one.
I want to now say why antisemitism is one of the most significant phenomena in my lifetime. Because the emergence of a new mutation of the world's oldest virus of hate is always a sign of massive tension within the cultures that give rise to it.
The new antisemitism is, strangely enough, part of the same phenomenon that gave rise to Al-Qaeda and the Arab Spring and the challenges to the West, described by Neil Ferguson in his new book, “Civilization.” We are living through one of the greatest ever changes in the history of civilization. And it is brought about, and it has been brought about four times in history, by radically new forms of information technology.
The first such change was the invention of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, that gave rise to the birth of civilization. The second great invention was the alphabet in the Sinai Desert, which gave rise to the Book and thus to the People of the Book and thus to us and spread out to become what Carl Jaspers called “The Axial Age.” The third revolution in the 15th century was the invention of printing which together with the Reformation gave rise to the birth of the modern.
And now we have the fourth revolution, instantaneous global communication, which is transforming the global economy, challenging power structures and all the rest. And change that we are currently experiencing - rapid, accelerating, ceaseless, unprecedented change - is one in which any of those who feel that they are left behind then feel the most dangerous, they then give rise to the most dangerous kind of politics there is. The politics of grievance, the politics of al-Nakba, the politics of a sense of humiliation.
It is that that drove Christianity after its defeats during the Crusades. It is that that drove Germany after its defeat in World War I, and it is that that is hurting the Arab and Islamic worlds today. That sense of humiliation of being left behind, and thus, and also as in the Arab Spring, a sense of frustration at local rulers.
But often, it extends its blame more widely, to global capitalism or sometimes just to the West, or sometimes just America and Israel, or sometimes just Israel.
So the new antisemitism is part of a wider phenomenon, the tsunami of change, whose outcome will define the 21st century.
Why do I believe that this is a dangerous phenomenon?
Antisemitism historically becomes dangerous when it unites two or more strong forces who otherwise would be utterly opposed.
In this case, it unites radical Islam with the anti-globalization lobby, with human rights NGOs, as well as the far right and the far left. Today, the new antisemitism has spread far beyond its original breeding grounds and is today finding a home - certainly in Europe among the unions, the university campuses - and tomorrow, it will find a home in Europe's churches.
And it has only just begun.
Let me make it clear. I am not one of those who believe that antisemitism is written into the fabric of the universe. My late father, a”h [may he rest in peace], used to say, whenever the traffic lights went red, “Antisemitic traffic lights!”
I don't believe that the destiny of Jews is to be hated. I call that “The Oy Vey Theory of Jewish Identity.” The truth is I don't even think antisemitism has very much to do with Jews.
It actually has to do with antisemites and we are just the collateral damage.
However, this new phenomenon is serious and it has only just begun, which brings me to my final point, which I make with all conceivable passion.
Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone.
The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate.
Besides which, for every single Jew alive today, there are 100 Muslims and 183 Christians.
Jews must not be left alone in the fight against antisemitism.
In this fight, we must find allies or we will fail. But we will find allies by realizing that the politics of anger, by insisting and reminding the world that the politics of anger begins by attacking Jews, but it never ends only by attacking Jews.
It was not Jews alone who suffered in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. And as we are seeing today in Libya, in Syria, or for that matter Iran, the regimes that are most hostile to Jews and Israel, are the most hostile to their own people and to freedom itself.
And that is the Archimedean lever by which we can move the world.
Those who deny freedom to Jews will eventually lose or fail to find freedom themselves. To win freedom, you have to let go of hate.
If you don't, you will remain enslaved to the past and you will fail to build a better future.
Let us - Jew, Christian, moderate Muslim - fight hate together for the sake of our children, for the sake of our future, and for the sake of the freedom to be who we are. Thank you.
