I have just returned from Haifa, where I delivered the closing address at a conference on antisemitism that had long been planned and repeatedly postponed because of the war.
There were scholars from 20 countries, 500 participants, and 220 speakers, among them the following three notable mentions: Deborah Lipstadt, who served as the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism until US President Donald Trump took office.
Dina Porat, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, former chief historian of Yad Vashem, and one of the architects of the internationally accepted definition of antisemitism.
Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the young Israeli jurist and expert in international law who, the day after October 7, began documenting the sexual crimes committed by Hamas against Israeli women.
This conference, organized by the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa in partnership with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Gratz College, was the largest annual academic gathering devoted to the subject.
Its proceedings ranged from the anti-Zionist obsession of major international organizations and the corruption of language that follows it to the destructive role of social media in amplifying the phenomenon, and the effects of artificial intelligence on the human mind.
It was a great honor for me to deliver its concluding address.
I recalled, of course – as had all those who spoke before me – the unprecedented wave of hatred that has swept across the world since October 7.
But I also insisted that the battle is far from lost.
I reminded the audience that the Jewish people have many allies: among Catholics since Vatican II, among Evangelicals since the Six Day War of 1967, among moderate Muslims, and among liberals of integrity everywhere.
And I dwelt at length on the tour of American campuses that I undertook a year ago, where I found that it was entirely possible to shake the certainties of lecture halls convinced that Israel is a colonial state, founded on apartheid, and potentially genocidal.
At times, I reminded them that Israel is, historically, a decolonized nation, born of one of the first great decolonial movements of the postwar era, wrested from the leading colonial power of the time, the British Empire.
At other moments, I showed that a state which grants equal civil rights to all its citizens, and in which one citizen out of five is Arab and often openly hostile to the very principles of Zionism, is the exact opposite of an apartheid regime.
And then, finally, I explained that I reported on one genocide at the age of 20 in Bangladesh, and another at 60 in Darfur; that I have reflected extensively on several others – the Armenian genocide, the extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda, and, of course, the Holocaust.
I further explained that it is not only morally obscene but logically absurd to speak of genocide in a war where warnings are issued before strikes, humanitarian corridors are opened every day, and ceasefires are constantly being negotiated.
And the fact is that these arguments of reason had an effect.
Folly wavered.
And, sometimes, an entire auditorium changed its mind.
In short, in Haifa I delivered a speech of combat – but also, I believe, of hope.
Politics and profound injustice
And yet.
Of course, there were Israelis in the audience.
They came from the Right and the Left.
Supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Among them were Jews, of course, but also – as Haifa is that singular city where different communities do not merely live side by side but share the same neighborhoods, the same streets, the same apartment buildings – Druze, Kurds, and Arabs.
What struck me was that, as they listened, these Israelis remained possessed by a feeling stronger than any argument: the feeling of being the victims of a profound injustice.
Of being cast, without examination or judgment, beyond the pale of the democratic nations. Of being boycotted – whether they were scholars, writers, filmmakers, musicians, or simply students – regardless of their individual opinions.
Of being betrayed, or on the verge of betrayal, by great democracies whose right to criticize this or that Israeli government they readily accepted, but which they had never imagined would go so far as to suspend their support, restrict arms deliveries, and leave them alone to face the enemy.
The feeling, among those who had all too rashly placed their hopes in Trump, that they could be traded away overnight for a Qatari mess of pottage or a deal with Tehran.
And then, whatever new alliances might emerge, there was the vertigo inspired by an America caught in the double whirlwind of a radical Left that would not mind “globalizing the Intifada,” and a MAGA Right outraged at the prospect of being dragged into yet another “Jewish war.”
I was also there to present the Hebrew language edition of The Solitude of Israel.
And I found myself thinking that I could almost have given the book a different title: The Sadness of Israel.