Since taking office in 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as America’s top diplomat, has been one of the most prominent Jews on the international stage, influencing world events.
That has been particularly true in the aftermath of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, killing over 1,200 people and seizing 251 captives.
Blinken has made nine regional trips that included visits to Israel to underscore American support for Israel’s war against the Iranian proxy groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
Efforts to advocate for the hostages
He has represented the United States in its efforts to secure the liberation of Gaza’s captives, which included the 105 released in the initial hostage agreement, and in its diplomatic endeavors to safeguard Israel’s southern and northern borders.
At a time when the United Nations Secretary-General said that the October 7 attack should be viewed within the context of “56 years of suffocating [Israeli] occupation” of the Palestinian people, Blinken placed the attack within the larger context of Jewish history, specifically the Holocaust, as he linked his own identity as a Jew with that of the Jewish people in Israel.
“After October 7, I come before you not only as the US secretary of State but also as a Jew,” he stated. “I understand on a personal level the harrowing echoes that Hamas’s massacres carry for Israeli Jews and indeed for Jews everywhere.”From the start of his public service career, Blinken has placed his own Judaism and Jewish values front and center of his own and the country’s foreign policy, based in part on ensuring that the massive human rights violations that led to the killing of six million Jews during World War II would never happen again.
He has transformed his personal story as the grandchild of a survivor of Russian programs and the stepson of renowned Holocaust survivor Samuel Pisar, one of the tenets that drives his commitment to a foreign policy based on human rights.
During his confirmation hearing for secretary of state, he told how Pisar, as a teenager in Bavarian woods who escaped a death march, fell to his knees in front of a US tank, uttering the only three English words he knew, “God bless America.”
Blinken explained that this sentiment was what “we [the US] represent to the world, however imperfectly, and what we can still be when we are at our best,” swearing that this would be “the vision that I would pursue.”
On his first day as secretary of state, he recorded a message in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2021 in which he recalled that Pisar had taught him “that evil on a grand scale can and does happen in our world and that we have a responsibility to stop it.”
“Every day that I serve as Secretary of State, I will carry the memory of my stepfather and his family and the six million Jewish people and millions of others who were killed during the Holocaust.
“I will remember that a nation’s power isn’t measured only by the size of its military or economy but by the moral choices it makes,” he said, pledging to ensure that atrocities like the Holocaust never happen again.