On the evening of Oct. 15, I had the honour of giving a brief opening rumination when the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation very appropriately honoured the editor of this newspaper, my friend Rob Roberts, for this newspaper’s prodigious efforts to present a balanced picture of the tragic and tumultuous events in the Middle East over the last year. No one was there to hear me, and I faithfully confined myself to my brief allotted time, but did attempt to convey the qualified but comparative optimism I feel about how the current hostilities will end. It is easy for Christian Anglo-Saxons to forget how solitary and outnumbered our Jewish friends feel in these troubled times. The State of Israel was founded out of the old League of Nations Palestine mandate in 1948 to provide a homeland for the Jewish people, whose entire worldwide population had been reduced by more than a third, six million souls (along with millions of non-Jews), in the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust, which had just been ended by the victory of the Allied armies over Germany three years before.