A Speech worth revisiting today

Here is a transcript of the seminal speech by Douglas Murray, delivered in London on 12 October 2023. It is worth revisiting today.

“I’m not Jewish myself, but most of my best friends are Jews. The reason I mention this is that, all my adult life, I’ve been surrounded by, or chosen to be surrounded by, Jews. And why should that be? In my secular moments, I’d say it’s been luck or good fortune. In my more religious moments, I’d say it’s a signal of God’s grace, of the wild grace of God. Because for me, these friendships and what I’ve learned from them, have been among the greatest blessings of my life. I’ve known Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews. I’ve known secular Jews, Orthodox Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews, Chabadnik Jews and even some Reform Jews.

All of these differences are of great importance to many of you, and to all of the people who argue them. But they mattered not one jot to the terrorists who broke into Israel on Saturday. They didn’t care whether they were killing secular Jews or religious Jews. Voters for Likud or voters for Yesh Atid. They didn’t care what the views were of the people they were killing, whether they were for or against recent judicial reforms in Israel, whether they were one of the few people who believed they don’t know how to run the country, or whether they were one of the eight million people who believe they do know how to run the country. All that the terrorists cared about was that their victims were Jews.

That was it. They had to be Jews.

I once asked Jonathan Sacks in private what he thought it meant to be a Jew, and he replied, quite characteristically, by quoting someone else. Specifically, he quoted his friend, the late great philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He said: ‘Douglas, Isaiah once answered this question when he was asked by saying, to be a Jew is to have a sense of history’. And I looked at Jonathan, I knew there was something more. He tilted his head and I said: ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘I think Isaiah was almost right’. And I said, ‘So what’s your answer’?

He said: ‘To be a Jew is to have a sense of memory.’

Now, memory can be a burden for some people, an almost impossible burden. But it’s also a blessing, because you as a people, you as individuals know what went before. You know that the Jewish people have been here many times before, in many worse situations, and too many times to count. One of my favourite writers, Stefan Zweig, in one of his last letters to Joseph Roth, who was soon to die himself in Paris, said from England: ‘Every morning I thank the Lord that I am free and in England. But I have an appetite for distant places again, and the desire to see the world in the round once more before it burns.’

Much as I adored Zweig, it seems imperative to me that we do not fall into the despondency or defeatism that Zweig expressed in that letter, however understandable it was, because what we know, what he didn’t know then, what we know now, is that the Jewish people have seen off every single one of their enemies for millennia. They have outlived every single one of the enemies who have wished to destroy them, from Pharaoh to Hitler. And they will see this enemy off as well. And I say that with absolute certainty.

Now what to do? May I make two suggestions? Firstly, it’s always seemed to me that it is not the right of non-Israelis to tell the Israelis what to do. It is up to them to do what they need to do. In my view, all that people in the diaspora and their supporters can say is that they have our love, our support and our solidarity in the weeks and months ahead. Whatever we can do to support them, we must do.

But a second point, if I may. What we can do here in Britain is to keep our own house in order, and our own house in Britain is in disarray. It is not acceptable. It should not be acceptable that the Jewish community among all of the communities of this country, in this diverse country, should be the one community expected to accept with equanimity those who cheer on the murder of Jews and those who support the murder of Jews. It is not acceptable that the Jewish community should be the only community in this land that is expected to put up with murder and then being scorned for their fellow Jews being murdered.

No other community would accept this. And I beg you not to accept it either.

I beg you not to accept it.

I came back to London the other night, and I heard the residue of the people outside the Israeli embassy. These people were not protesting against Israeli countermeasures. They hadn’t even had any countermeasures. They were protesting because Jews by the hundreds had been slaughtered in Israel, and they wanted to wound us more. Well, they might try.

But we should not accept that with equanimity. I’ve written in The Spectator a demand on the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that supporters of Hamas in the UK must be treated in the same way as supporters of Isis were. Some people thought that the claim that Hamas was Isis was a rhetorical claim. We know since Saturday, if we didn’t know before, it is not rhetoric: it is real. If you stand in Britain with a Hamas flag, you should not be allowed to be free in Britain. You should be arrested. Have your citizenship withdrawn. Your passport withdrawn. You should be deported. You should be sent to Gaza and try your luck there. But you should not be given the right to insult and to taunt Jews after the death of Jews. It’s intolerable, and we should not tolerate it.

Let me say one more thing, and it’s the main thing I wanted to say to you tonight: that you’re not alone. That you’re not alone. The saddest thing I’ve heard in recent days have been the number of Jewish friends of mine who said, in Israel and outside of Israel, ‘It’s always like this, we’re always alone’. And I just wanted to say that isn’t the case. You know, you have, among other things, a Democrat president of the United States who so far has been so fully behind the Jewish state. It is very hard to see what better statement he could give. We have a Conservative prime minister here in the UK, Rishi Sunak, who has been utterly supportive of the Israeli state to date.

The whole civilised world is behind the Jewish state today. Now that may change. As my friend Bari Weiss wrote on Saturday, we will have to be very careful in the weeks and months ahead to remember Saturday and to keep it in mind. The BBC and others who can’t even define a terrorist are already past this. The slaughter that’s only still now being uncovered is currently somewhere down the line of stories. It’s already falling away, and yet we mustn’t allow it to fall away. The dead are not even buried.

So I wanted to say that it is not the case that the Jewish community of this country is alone. You are not. There are many millions of people, civilised people in this country and across the world who are with you as well.

I speak for myself when I quote, if I may, in closing, one of my favourite lines in Scripture from the book of Ruth. You all know it. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.’ And I tell you this with utter certainty. If they keep coming for the Jews, they keep coming for you: I’ll tell you this. They may come for the Zionists. Very well. I am a Zionist. They may keep coming for the Israelis. Very well. I’m an Israeli. They may come continuously for the Jews. Very well. I’m a Jew.

Am Yisrael Chai.”

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