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Congratulations to the brave and brilliant author and journalist Douglas Murray on receiving the 2025 UN Watch Moral Courage Award, presented in Geneva at our Gala Dinner on Thursday night before a sold-out audience from around the world.
Douglas Murray’s Full Remarks:
It’s a great honor for me to be here. Such an honor for me to be here also with Sophia [Aram]. It was so wonderful to hear her speak earlier, and I should mention that I’ve been very familiar with the work of UN Watch for many, many years now. And so, knowing your work as well as I do, it’s a special honor for me to be honored by you.
I was thinking on the way in here earlier that I remember at a conference in Washington, D.C., some 20 years ago or so, a very nice lady came up to me and said how much she admired me and my work. I said thank you very much to her and was very pleased—and was British about it and didn’t know what to say. And as we kept talking, she said, “I mean, just the way you go after the UN.” And I thought, well, I do—but she said, “Like day after day after day…” And I then had this terrible realization that she thought I was Hillel Neuer.
And, you know, that happens sometimes. Sometimes you have to work out whether or not you correct the error—but I didn’t. I was very proud to be mistaken for Hillel Neuer, and I’m very happy to take any credit that’s actually due to him.
But thank you, Hillel, and all of your colleagues for all the amazing work, some of which we’ve seen this evening.
I know I’m going to have a brief sit-down conversation after these initial remarks, but let me just say a couple of things, if I may. The first is that in the year and a half or so now that I’ve spent most of my time in Israel—and I’ve spent a lot of time there before, but particularly since the October 7th—I’ve learned an awful lot of things. I spoke with endless numbers of survivors, of victims, victims’ families, families of the kidnapped.
And also, perhaps most informing for me in a way, was that I got to spend so much time embedded with the IDF—the remarkable young men and women of the IDF. And I mention that really because it always feels to me slightly obscene to be said to have any courage, because I really think—and think the world needs to know—that it’s these young men and women who have the real courage in our time.
And when I think of the underlying defamation—of all of the defamations which we’ve heard about tonight, of all of the lies, the smears, the untruths, and much more spread about Israel—perhaps most painful in a way is the way in which those young men and women are smeared and lied about and misrepresented on a daily basis by people who can’t possibly realize what these people have to go through. And go through not by choice, but because they know that they must do this if they are to defend their people, their country, their way of life, and indeed, in my view, the whole of the civilized world.
I often think, though, of the flip side of this. What would it be like if more young people in the West in particular realized that the young men and women in Israel, who they’re encouraged to defame and lie about, are actually people that they have an enormous amount to learn from? That in fact, among young people—from campuses across the West, in cities like New York where I live, to the streets of almost every European city—young people have been taught to dislike, to libel, and to lie about their contemporaries.
And I wonder what it would be—I’ll just finish with this thought—I wonder what it would be if instead of that, they realized how much they could learn from their contemporaries. Imagine if they could meet them, instead of just talking about them and having great theories about them.
And one of the things that’s been my great honor to have in recent years is an alarmingly large number of rabbis in my life—which, since I’m not Jewish, I definitely have attended synagogue more often than many of my Jewish friends and have more rabbis than I think almost any Jew I know. But I mention that it’s a great honor because of the amount that I’ve been able to learn from them—in private conversation, public dialogues, and much more.
And I just wanted to share one thing with you in particular this evening, which is: we live in an age which has many problems—many technological problems, many moral problems. As ever, it’s always like that to some extent. But one of the abiding things in our age as well is a form of cynicism—people who are told, as people who have no right to be cynical, by the way. You could say that at a certain point in life, you have a right to be slightly cynical. But to be cynical and young—to believe that you understand everything in a world you don’t yet know—is a true waste of human talent and human opportunity.
I was talking about this recently with one of my rabbis, and he said something to me I just wanted to share with you this evening as well—it’s been much on my mind.
We were talking about Hebrew, which I know even less well than French. And we were talking in particular about the Hebrew word for Zionism—which, and the Ambassador among many others maybe can correct me on this—the Hebrew for Zionism is Tziyonut. I think I’ve got that right—Tziyonut.
And my friend said to me, “You know, Douglas, it’s a very interesting thing, because there’s another word in Hebrew that’s very close to that, which is Tzinyut—cynicism.” He said, “The interesting thing about this is it’s almost like God has given us a sign here. The words are very close together. But here’s the thing: they are opposites.”
The cynic will do nothing with his days. Everything is jaded. Their life is full of disbelief. They have low opinions of everyone and low expectations about everything.
But the Zionist—the Zionist cannot afford to have these low expectations. The Zionist cannot afford all of these cheap and shallow tricks. Zionism—Zion indeed—cannot be built or redeemed by cynics.
It will be redeemed by Zionists.
And of all of the things I think at this time, I go back to those remarkable people in Israel I’ve had the honor of spending so much of the last year and a half with—who know this truth instinctively, who don’t need to be told it by a rabbi, but demonstrate daily what it is to actually build and to fight for something you love.
So, thank you.
