Former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh, speaking to Israel National News from the Conference of Presidents, explains her message to the summit about the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel.
“The celebration of 75 years and what it means not only for Israel internally but for Israel and her relations with global jury was the focus of our conversation and it actually very much has to do with the message of hope,” she says.
“That a 75-year young country that’s founded upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence in its entirety and that is the nation-state of an indigenous people returned to an ancestral homeland after millennia of exile and persecution committed to equality, that is the mission values of the Declaration of Independence, and that is a great source of hope, not only to be able to heal internal rifts that we see as we speak, but to also bridge the gaps between Israel and global Jewry, and not less importantly to be able to address the challenges Israel faces in the international arena.”
Commenting on the dangerous increase in worldwide antisemitism, Cotler-Wunsh says that she spoke about it on a panel at the conference, describing how antisemitism is mutating into a war waged to delegitimize the State of Israel.
According to Cotler-Wunsh, you can trace the evolution of modern antisemitism to the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution in the UN which morphed into the 2001 Durban conference claims of Israel as an “apartheid state.”
“The manifestations of that are what we see after 22 years of “Israel Apartheid Weeks” on campuses around the world, certainly all over North America, the manifestations of that today are that “Zionist” is synonymous with “racist” and the only way to fight that is actually the students that are out there – a young generation that is so capable and keen to understand their identity that they are fighting for&hellip to stand firm and with pride and with confidence for their identity as a Zionist, an integral part of every Jew”s identity for millennia.”
She stresses the importance for these young Jews of “stipulating the fact that they are members of an indigenous people, they are not genocidal occupiers, they are not white settler colonialists, and they are certainly not members of a people that have an apartheid regime.”
According to her, the connection many are making between judicial reform in Israel and the diaspora needs to be viewed under the auspices of Israel”s Declaration of Independence.

“I believe the word equality appears seven times in the Declaration of Independence,” she says. “If we renew the covenant to that Declaration of Independence and make very clear that the vision mission values of that nation-state are far from being built and the importance of actually engaging global Jewry in that conversation, to be able to give them the understanding that this is not the same sort of conversation as maybe are relevant in other countries, and that the three branches of democracy, ie, the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches, have to create renewed checks and balances between them, after what many see as trespass of the judicial branch&hellip It’s very important to explain that to the people because there is concern and that is not being explained to the Jewish diaspora.”
She stresses the importance of educating diaspora Jews who come from “seasoned democracies” in how the process is unfolding.
“On the other hand, we have to be very clear on the fact that the State of Israel was founded to be its own particular nation-state that connects universal values from a very particular place,” she says.