I came to Spain for the first time four years ago to take part in the first congress of terror victims, here in Madrid. This gave me my first opportunity to meet and speak with people whose bitter and painful experiences were similar to mine. The cultural and language differences between us turned out to be relatively insignificant. The factors which we shared were far more important.

During these four years, I have returned several times to Spain. Your country, like mine, has continued to suffer from the ongoing barbarism and viciousness of the terrorists. And as a result your society, like mine, has found it necessary to take defensive measures which conflict with our desire to live a free and unrestricted life. The tension, the divisions and the debate which result from these measures have become an increasingly weighty factor in the lives of many communities.

We have to learn to deal with these issues because they will not disappear in the foreseeable future. We have every reason to believe, in fact, that they will become larger and more serious. This is because the terrorists are not losing the battle, even if we sometimes try to believe the opposite.

My daughter Malki was fifteen when she was murdered in a restaurant massacre carried out by Hamas, six and a half years ago. Nothing in our lives prepared my wife and children and me for the shock and the ongoing, continuous pain of this catastrophic loss.

For myself, the process of coping with the trauma has included several kinds of activity which were completely unknown to me before 9th August 2001. I will mention three of them.

The first is the creation of a foundation in the name of our child. The Malki Foundation helps Israeli families to deal with the challenge of raising a child with severe disabilities by funding therapies and giving equipment. We have such a child. Consequently we understood the problem well before we began to think of how to address it. In our spare time, my wife and I write newspaper articles, we speak to journalists and religious leaders, we do everything we can to create awareness of the work being done in our daughter’s name. This has enabled us to raise money from people all over the world who are willing to help us. Today, the Malki Foundation provides support for Moslem, Christian and Jewish families throughout Israel. During this month, January 2008, we passed a very satisfying milestone: 25,000 therapy sessions have now been provided to those families by the Malki Foundation. This is done in the name of our daughter and as a memorial to her life. We regard it as a powerful affirmation of the humanitarian spirit and also as a reminder to ourselves and our community of the deep, profound differences between the values of the terrorists and the values of our own society.

The second activity is that my wife and I speak and write about terrorism. You may ask “What does a society like Israel need to know about terrorism that it has not already learned during the decades and generations that it has suffered?” The answer is that terrorism dehumanizes. Most of us already know that terror dehumanizes its direct victims. What is done to the victims of terrorism is the most deeply offensive thing that can be done to a person. The practitioners of terror despise individual human beings. The identity and personality of the victim is of no interest whatever to them. But terror also dehumanizes our society, and this is not so obvious to many people. We have found it necessary to explain that when you rush to sweep away the broken glass, when you work all night to re-open the bombed restaurant, when you fail to allow life to stop, to react to the tragedy – the effect is that your society fails to empathize with its victims. We try to explain that, sometimes, the right response is simply to weep.

The third activity is to speak publicly to politicians, government leaders, representatives of international organizations including the UN and its agencies, and to prominent figures in the world of religion. We have found that the way we terror victims think about terror is not always the way public figures think about it. Without a doubt, this is the most frustrating of the three activities which we have undertaken.

I had the privilege of speaking from the platform at the Valencia congress of terror victims in 2006. I mentioned the Madrid Declaration which uses simple and direct language to articulate some powerful truths:

“Terrorism is never justifiable... Whatever its form, terrorism is always an unjust and unjustified, cruel, abominable and repulsive crime. It is an affront to the most basic rights of individuals and communities.“

In Spanish: „El terrorismo nunca está justificado... Pero, cualquiera que sea su forma de manifestación, el terrorismo es siempre un crimen injusto e injustificado, cruel, abominable y rechazable por atentar contra los derechos más elementales de las personas y de las comunidades.”

But even in my own country, this thing we call an affront to the most basic human rights is sometimes forgotten in the name of political expediency. My country’s government announced last month that it is re-evaluating the criteria by which terrorists are released from prison. The motivation to do this is political. It may result in the freeing of murderers, perhaps even the young woman who planned the massacre which killed my child. Most terror victims cannot understand this. My wife and I cannot understand it.

I mentioned in the Valencia congress that a committee of the United Nations has been trying for the past nine years to write a convention against terrorism. Ordinary people like us think that lawyers and diplomats have the necessary skills to do this. We know how to define terrorism. But there is an international association of states comprising some 57 countries, nearly 30% of the 191 member states of the United Nations. For eleven years, this association has frustrated the writing of the United Nations anti-terror convention in multiple ways.

Since our Valencia congress, there has been an important international development. The General Assembly of the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution in September 2006, entitled Global Strategy to Counter Terrorism. This resolution has some good news and some not-so-good news.

On the positive side:

• This declaration is the first time the nations of the world have agreed on a strategic approach to fighting terrorism

• It is the first UN document on the subject of counter-terrorism that mentions the victims of terrorism, and refers to the “dehumanization of victims of terrorism” several times.

• It was accepted by consensus, without a vote, and therefore can claim to express the will of the entire family of mankind. Last month, the secretary-general of the United Nations said: “I think it is the first time the 192 countries have come together and taken a stand on the issue of terrorism. Now the test will be how we implement it.”

His concern about how it is implemented should also be our concern.

You will not be surprised to know that there are less-positive aspects which we need to keep in our minds:

1.   Nothing in this Global Strategy is binding on the countries that voted for it. It is an advisory declaration, with no legal effect. It is very different from a resolution of the Security Council or a United Nations Convention. Those create obligations under international law. This does not. Perhaps this is why the Global Strategy was adopted unanimously, with much less of the usual arguing among countries.

2.   No monitoring system in built into the Global Strategy. It will be up to the UN’s Member States to decide how to implement the resolution in whole, in part or not at all. Countries might comply, might do something or might ignore it. We will have no way to know.

3.   Related to the previous points: countries which are not willing to oppose terrorism, or which actively support terrorism, cannot be reached via this Global Strategy. It does not bind them, or pressure them, or even embarrass them.

4.   If anything good is going to come out of this Global Strategy declaration, it will happen only if individual states adopt the elements of the Global Strategy. As people directly affected by the success or failure of this plan, we must take an active role to ensure that this happens as widely and quickly as possible. And if it happens then it must happen effectively, properly and with full and meaningful respect for the painful price paid by terror’s victims. In this context I want to mention here a manifesto called “Building an International Alliance Against Terrorism” which was issued at a conference in Paris on 9th September 2007 arranged by Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme and signed by several organizations of terror victims and other interested parties from a number of countries. I will be happy to give copies of that document to anyone who asks. It is here with me.

5.   It lacks a definition of terrorism. This is a very important matter. Without a definition of terrorism, the countries which unanimously agree to unite against terror can never achieve anything concrete or meaningful.

6.   Other important points were excluded from the Global Strategy document through the unfortunate efforts of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. A lack of time prevents me from detailing them.

As victims of terror, we – more than anyone else – have to ensure this initiative succeeds and becomes effective. The dehumanized victims of terrorism must be given a face and a voice. They have neither, today. Achieving this will demand action at the levels of moral, legal and social action.

To protect the principles and values of a civilized and tolerant society, it is imperative that our voices – the voices of the victims of terror, the inspirational words of the Madrid Declaration – be heard in the United Nations, in the media, in our own governments and in every public place.

Thank you.