V “We need boots on the ground. Not just on the front lines that millions of Israelis rushed to on October 7. Wherever there are Jews and their allies, they need to be acting,” Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, told the JC on a visit last week to Oxford University where dozens of professors, faculty members and academics from across the globe participated in the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy’s 2024 Oxford Summer Institute Programme. “They need to be fighting the unconventional war we are faced with and recognise it as our shared struggle,” she added.
Every year, ISGAP, an international organisation that maps, decodes and combats contemporary antisemitism, gathers academics to provide them with the tools to build relevant syllabuses. The title of Cotler-Wunsh’s talk reveals much about her work: Writing on the Wall: Antisemitism as a National Security Threat, not just to Jews & Israel.
“This tsunami of antisemitism is not just a problem for the Jews. It should be enough that Jews and non-Jewish Zionists are being attacked – but if it’s not enough, antisemitism historically is always just a predictor of what’s coming next,” she said. “We might be the canary in the coal mine, but the coal mine will collapse.”
Cotler-Wunsh is one of 35 special envoys to combat antisemitism appointed in countries around the world. She works to raise awareness about and create strategies to combat the current surge of antisemitism, which, she said, represents a national security threat not only to Israel but to all democratic societies.
She recently met her counterparts at a gathering for the 30-year anniversary of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded 300 more, where they put together a 12 step-guideline to combat antisemitism in all spaces.
“Special envoys have an important responsibility with regard to their government and legislators. It’s not enough to legislate or make a commitment to combat antisemitism, somebody has to be following up.
“We know that there is an increase in antisemitism, in university campuses, on social media platforms, on the streets. It is tracked by many organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which issues reports showing the tsunami of antisemitism that individual people feel,” she said. “It’s important to remember that, until it reaches that height of violence, only a fraction of antisemitic events are reported because people feel that nothing is done about it.”
Since Hamas’s massacre, antisemitism has targeted Jews around the world, from calls to boycott the Jewish state and anti-Israel encampments on university campuses to the direct targeting of Jewish sites and Jewish persons.
“If October 7 made anything clear, it is that we are one people, it doesn’t matter where we live. Some still fail to understand the need for a state of Israel, but their safety and security is inextricably bound up with its existence because as one people, we are impacted in the same way.”
In the days following October 7, Cotler-Wunsh noted, masks came off and Jews and allies of Jews who thought they belonged to progressive spaces found themselves isolated.
Leading up to October 7, she explained, were decades of forgetting our shared identity and thinking by some that they one could “shed their Zionist pound of flesh” to be a “good Jew”.
In the aftermath of the invasion, however, Jews around the world started to again to feel part of one people and understood they needed to engage.
“My greatest fear is that it could happen again if we don’t understand the existential nature of this moment,” she said. “We have to remember who we are as a people, reclaim our identity and our story as indigenous people. Zionism is integral to the identity of Jews. One cannot just shed it,” she added.
The future of global Jewry, Cotler-Wunsh said, depends on how democratic societies respond to the existential threat they are faced with.
“October 7 was the attack of barbarism on civilisation.
“Civilisation was under attack. We need to be fighting this war together in whatever front it is raging, whether in Israel or in unconventional spaces, on campuses, in online spaces, in the streets,” she said.
“We are at a crossroad for democracy and free society generally.
“Wherever democratic values and principles can be reclaimed and resurrected or renewed, that is where we will see Jews. As a people, I believe we can get through this very difficult time together but my greatest concern is what will happen if we fail to recognise it as our shared struggle,” she added.
