“Without power you are dead in the world,” said Dan Meridor, former deputy prime minister and minister of intelligence and atomic energy of the State of Israel, to a worldwide assembly at Jerusalem's International Convention Center recently. “Nobody learned this more than the Jews.”
The history of Jewish power and powerlessness can be glimpsed above and below ground at the convention center, site of the 6th Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. The bathrooms are in a below-grade hallway next to the kilns of the 10th Roman Legion, the waist-high remains of which were discovered during the complex's construction in the 1950s. Standing before these last pathetic fragments of the Roman army that burned the Judean capital and cast the Jewish people into 1,950-odd years of exile, attendees could be reminded of the long history of the matter at hand, along with one possible remedy to the problem—or maybe the only remedy. One of the better articulations of what more than 2,000 people were doing in Jerusalem instead of, say, Ottawa, came from Israeli TV presenter Tamar Ish-Shalom, who hosted the opening night festivities on March 19: “The defeat of anti-Semitism is one of the top foreign-policy priorities of Israel,” she read from a teleprompter.
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