Jonathan Sacks on the unlikeliness of Israel

Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column, “Things Worth Remembering,” where he gives great speeches that we should take to heart. Scroll down to hear Douglas reflect on Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ speech at the 2013 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference, in which he reminded the audience that “Israel is the greatest collective affirmation of life in all of Jewish history. ”

Tomorrow, Israel will commemorate the first anniversary of the most brutal, most destructive pogrom since the Holocaust.

It would be understandable to feel despair at this point.

The attacks on Israel are only increasing. More than a hundred rockets were launched from Iran on Tuesday, with the aim of ending even more Jewish lives. They failed, but one Palestinian lost his life.

That same day, I sat with Bari in New York City and we discussed the other attack on Israel that continues throughout the West: the rhetorical attack. Recently, just forty blocks away at Barnard College, students were calling for an intifada. Manhattan also, as I wrote in my last column, hosted the United Nations General Assembly, which many world leaders saw as an opportunity to demonize the world’s only Jewish state.

All the while, the United States provided the weakest defense imaginable.

The Jewish people have been betrayed again. But amid this week’s attacks were the celebrations of Rosh Hashanah; it’s a new year in Israel.

Today I’m not going to write about despair. I’m going to write about hope.

To do this, I will lean on my late friend Jonathan Sacks, who was Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom between 1991 and 2013. The year he retired, he gave a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in Washington, DC. I was fortunate to be present, and I have thought of his words often over the past year.

Jonathan was born in London in 1948. He confesses in his speech that as a child he had never understood the sentence in the Jewish scriptures that says: There is not just one enemy that opposes us. “I always said: that’s from my parents’ generation, not ours – not from us who were born after the Holocaust.”

Living in London, Jonathan said: ‘I have never experienced a single incident of anti-Semitism. Until eleven years ago.”