Held between 26th and 27th  January at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and called Generation Truth, the second international conference on combating antisemitism was a picture of cracking contradictions. Organised by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, it featured speakers from various far-right groups, many European, and saw Australia’s former Prime Minister and Pentecostal believer, Scott Morrison, address attendees.  (The man is obviously touting for gigs.)

The attendance list caused problems prior to last year’s inaugural conference, not least because it included speakers from parties with memberships boasting neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.  If this was Chikli’s effort at humour, violating that injunction that Zionism and Nazism shall never be linked, few were laughing.  Notable international figures such as the UK’s chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, cancelled their participation on realising the unsavoury lineup.  ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt also withdrew from the conference “in light of some of the recently announced participants.”

By 2026, Chikli had learned a few lessons sufficiently to see appearances by Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Jewish Federations of North America President and CEO Eric Fingerhut accede to appearing.  Not that those lessons were deep ones.  The minister still believed that far-right politicians, notably from Europe, had a role to play in combating antisemitism, much to the consternation of Jewish community leaders and advocates in the diaspora.  “We just have a disagreement,” he put it dismissively in an interview with The Times of Israel. 

This particular approach involves a calculus on how Islamophobic your counterparts are relative to antisemitism.  A........

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