Defender of Israel Award to Rabbi Leo D; Presenter: Larry Mizel at RJC Leadership Summit, Oct 28 '23

Good evening and shalom. My apologies for not being able to be with you here tonight in person. I'd like to thank the RJC, especially Steve Mizel and David Oren, for honoring us all with this award tonight. And I say us all because the true defenders of Israel were Lucy, Maya, and Reena, who were brutally murdered in cold blood on April 7th, 2023, in the Jordan Valley while we were driving up to our Passover holiday in the Sea of Galilee. Lucy was my other half, or in fact I was hers. She sparked my passion for Israel as well as my passion for life. Lucy chose for us to live in Efrat, in the heart of the Judean Hills, on the route that Abraham took with Isaac for the Binding of Isaac, and not far from where Jacob buried his beloved Rachel. Lucy believed that defending Israel meant to build our home and our future here forever. Her last act was to donate her organs and to save five lives, including that of an Israeli Arab. Lucy was a true defender of Israel. Maya was 20 years old, volunteering for her national service in a growth town in the south of Israel. She was inspiring the next generation of high school girls in Jewish studies, values, and Torah. Maya was a defender of Israel. Reena was 15 years old and popular with every girl in her boarding school. She was the one who'd put her arm around the girls that were lonely and sad, and she was the one who'd welcome a new face to the class. She was a true defender of Israel. But now the baton has passed from them to me. And one of my first challenges was encountering CNN on three separate occasions. I and my family were equated with the terrorists in moral equivalence. Christine Amanpour's feeble apology for describing the brutal murder of my wife and daughters as a shootout, suggesting that my girls were firing at the terrorists, has not been accepted. For more about where this is going, watch this space. Five years ago, the Trump administration wisely canceled payments to the vile, anti-Semitic UNRWA organization, a United Nations front for funding terror training in Judea and Samaria. This funding has been resumed by the current administration, and the terrorists that killed my wife and daughters were trained with U.S. taxpayers' money. This must stop. The Palestinian Authority continues to openly incentivize terrorism by paying the families of dead terrorists, such as those that murdered my wife and daughters, a million dollars for their services. Their $300 million annual budget for pay-for-slay is also funded by the international community, and this too must stop. The Middle East consists of Israel and over a dozen Arab countries. Israel is the only democratic country with human rights for all its citizens, including two million Arab Israelis. Our Arab neighbors are not free, nor are they democratic. That means that over 100 million Muslim Arabs in our region have no freedom of expression, no freedom of religion, and no freedom to vote in the government. The only Arabs that do have these freedoms are our Arab Israeli citizens. The paradox of our free society is that everyone can complain publicly about the Israeli government, Jews and Arabs alike, and this is regularly reported in the international press. But nobody complains publicly about the plight of the 100 million Muslim Arabs who are really suffering in Arab terror regimes, including the 2 million Palestinian Arabs who suffer under the terror state of the Palestinian Authority, because they would be killed if they did so. An anti-truth has been created where the one free and democratic country in the Middle East has been transformed into the evil Zionist regime, whilst the Arab terror states are perceived as being paradise. Fortunately, there is one man standing up against this hypocrisy and protecting the safety of every U.S. and free world citizen against all attempts by your current president to arm Iran with nuclear missiles capable of destroying New York and California within one hour, and that's Bibi. He's not perfect, but he's the only world leader you can rely on to prevent this global existential threat. Thank you, Bibi. My life and that of my three remaining children has been changed beyond measure since the 7th of April, but we will all continue to be defenders of Israel. It's our home, and whilst I'm sad about the past, I'm hopeful about the future of this beautiful and vibrant land. There's always a limited amount of challenges we're asked to face in life, but there's an infinite amount of good that surrounds us every day. If we wake up in the morning, if we can breathe the sweet air and sip our coffee, we can savor every moment and thank God for our existence. And that's the paradox of tragedy: the greater one's loss, the more one can appreciate that every moment of life is precious. As the saying goes, the pessimist believes the world is at its worst possible, and the optimist agrees, because from here there's only one direction. And so we go on with joy and hope, but with the memories of a perfect life once lived. My kids and I call it episode 2. No worse than episode 1, but without three of the best characters, the three ultimate defenders of Israel: Lucy, Maya, and Reena. May their memory be a blessing to us all. Thank you once again for your ongoing support of Israel, for the only democratic country in the Middle East, your ally and your friend forever. And may we all go from strength to strength. Amen.