Wolfgang Ischinger receives the Prize for Understanding and Tolerance

Read below the full acceptance speech by Wolfgang Ischinger.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends of the Jewish Museum Berlin. I am really deeply touched by this award. I don't know if I deserve this honor, but I accept it with gratitude. My thanks go first and foremost to my friend Ron Lauder. Dear Ron, I cannot thank you enough for having taken the decision to climb into an airplane and to come all the way from New York to join us here tonight, and to speak on this important occasion. I am deeply moved by your extremely kind words. As others have said before, if my mother were here tonight she would actually believe every word you said. Ron, your presence here tonight, as the President of the World Jewish Congress, is so important as we ponder the question how this country, how our society can, should, and must deal with the rise of anti-Semitism which this time around comes not only from extreme right wing fringe groups. Thank you for being here tonight, and for sharing your views with this German audience.

I would also like to thank the director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Hetty Berg, and her entire team from the bottom of my heart. They planned and organized a great event. A very special thanks also goes to Walter Kuna and his deputy Klaus Mangold from the Circle of Friends and Supporters of the Jewish Museum. I had the privilege of being a member of this group myself for many years and would like to thank the former chairman, my old friend Michael Naumann, once again for bringing me onto this committee. And Kiki Mangold will know exactly why I sincerely thank her too. Last but not least, I would like to thank Michael Blumenthal. Dear Michael, you designed, founded and managed this museum and without your charismatic role, the museum would not have become what it is today. You have given the museum its direction and have successfully made it a central part of life in this city. This museum stands for the goal of living together in tolerance. The Jewish Museum Berlin is therefore, to put it in current terms, the total counterpoint to the hate terror that befell so many innocent Israelis on October 7 of this year.

The Holocaust, which this museum also commemorates, was a rupture of civilization, a singularity in terms of scale and industrial cruelty. However, I fear that the first half of the 20th century was by no means the end of civilizational ruptures. On the contrary, we have recently been dealing with an accelerating disintegration of the rules-based international order. We are experiencing renewed ruptures of civilization. The opening of this museum in September 2001 took place just a few days before 9/11. Now, after the bloody massacres in eastern Ukraine in March 2022 - I'll just mention the keyword Butsha - we have this unspeakable event of October 7, 2023, which will go down in history as an outbreak of bestial inhumanity of almost unimaginable proportions. There was no attempt to conceal or cover up this mass murder; instead, a gang of terrorists rejoiced in the pain, horror, and death of this massacre. The fact that they not only filmed their atrocities, but also bragged about what they had filmed - it could hardly get any more barbaric than that. On this evening, we must therefore remember the many victims with compassion, sadness, pain and probably also anger, and think of their relatives, neighbors and indeed the entire Israeli population, who can no longer be as sure of their right to exist as many may have been before October 7. Even if we consider that Israel has been under constant and unceasing threat from the outside for decades.

Ladies and gentlemen, I accept this honor on behalf of the Munich Security Conference team, which has worked with me over the past decade and a half to further develop this international forum for dialogue. The team and I are proud of the fact that over the years we have succeeded in persuading conflicting parties to appear together in Munich. I am thinking of the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, I am thinking of Serbia and Kosovo, I am also thinking of the USRussian reset of 2009. But I am thinking in particular of the conference at which it was possible to bring Prince Turki al Faisal from Saudi Arabia onto a panel together with Danny Ayalon, the then Deputy Foreign Minister of the State of Israel. There were controversial positions at this event, but the two shook hands at the end. A first sign of a possible dialog between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, I heard afterwards that upon their return home they both were by no means only applauded for their handshake. Indee, the road to reconciliation, the road to peace, is usually a particularly rocky one, and there rarely are any shortcuts!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Munich Security Conference was founded 60 years ago as a defense conference in 1963, the very same year Martin Luther King gave his famous speech with the sentence "I have a dream". Ladies and gentlemen, I also have a dream: How wonderful it would be if, at a future Munich Security Conference, we could see Israeli and Palestinian leaders shaking hands, surrounded by their Arab and European neighbors. After what has happened now, the realization of such a dream seems to be a long way off. But we should never give up. The dream of reconciliation and peace in the Middle East must remain our obligation. Especially for us Germans, who have committed ourselves to declaring the existence of the State of Israel as part of our raison d'être. Former US President Barack Obama recently made a wise statement about the complexity that we have to deal with when addressing the situation and the vision of peace in the Middle East. It is all about striking a balance between fighting terrorism on the one hand and upholding the rule of law and our values, especially the dignity of the individual, on the other. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we must not allow our values to be destroyed and that is precisely what Hamas terror is aimed at. They want to fight our way of life, our way of living in freedom and dignity and without fear, and replace it with something completely different. After 9/11, George W. Bush told his fellow Americans to get on with their lives, and to go to a baseball game if they wanted. "We don't want to give up our way of life." I remember when a few days after 9/11, there was a little boy standing at an intersection in a suburb of Washington DC, with a big sign in front of him that read: "Honk if you Love America". Nothing moved me to tears in those days after 9/11 like this little boy's gesture. This is part of the values that are always worth standing up for, ladies and gentlemen.

I would like to return to the original motto of this prize and the purpose of awarding it, which is the principle of tolerance. It was none other than Karl Popper who pointed out the tolerance paradox, namely that tolerance can only flourish if intolerance is prevented or combated. Because if we do not oppose intolerance, the number of tolerant people will almost inevitably decrease and the number of intolerant people will increase. Tolerance is therefore not only a virtue, but also an obligation. An obligation to fight its opposite, intolerance, racism and especially anti-Semitic hatred. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, the question arises as to how we as Germans, conscious of our own history, German-Jewish and German-Israeli history, should view the current events. Some are now offering Israel well-meant advice on whether and how the current military campaign can be conducted at all in compliance with international law, in compliance with the norms of international law of war. Yes, Israel certainly needs good advice in the face of this catastrophe, but first and foremost Israel needs solidarity! Ladies and gentlemen, advice will presumably not only be taken note of, but also taken seriously, if there is a solid relationship of trust with the person giving the advice. As we say at the Federal Foreign Office: trust is the currency of diplomacy! Many in Israel think that America can be trusted. Two aircraft carriers cruising in the Mediterranean are visible proof of this and I would go so far as to say that if these two aircraft carriers were not cruising in the Mediterranean now, the existence of Israel, the survival of the Israeli state, would perhaps be threatened in a much more dramatic way. Perhaps Israel would already be involved in a massive multi-front war. It's good to have partners, friends you can rely on. Of course, it is particularly important that the military campaign with which Israel is now seeking to eliminate Hamas as a terrorist threat in the Gaza Strip should be joined by a political process as soon as possible. A plan for how the Gaza Strip should be administered or governed in future without Hamas. To me, such a political concept seems to be long overdue, especially in view of the massive protests that are growing on our streets in Europe and now also in the major American cities. Ladies and gentlemen, we must therefore ask ourselves to what extent Israel can actually trust us, who define the existence of this state as part of our raison d'être. Yes, we have provided Israel with military aid. Just think of the submarines. Yes, we work with and for Israel in many bodies, but when it came to the vote in the United Nations, the German government decided to abstain after what must have been a careful, lengthy and painful deliberation.

Ladies and gentlemen, my opinion on this is that Germany cannot and must not abstain when it comes to its relationship with Israel. If this phrase of raison d'état is not to be an empty shell, then our place in such a dispute must be on Israel's side. In my view, there really is no alternative. This is why I would like to make the following suggestion: Perhaps the German Bundestag could find time in the coming weeks to discuss the meaning of the concept of Israel's right to exist as part of our raison d'être on the basis of a text proposed by the Federal Government and pass a corresponding resolution. I believe we need clarity here, not only internally, but also externally, as to what this security pledge means if the worst comes to the worst. Against the backdrop of our history, we owe this to the State of Israel, its citizens and the victims of October 7, 2023. Thank you all very much.