On Tuesday, the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, noted that the government is devoting an extra £250 million this year to enhance the security of Britain’s Jewish community. He did so in the context of a statement about British foreign policy and efforts to advance a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Mr Miliband is many things, but he is not stupid. He knew what his government was doing. And he knew why the two things were connected.
The decision by the British government to sanction anyone associated with what they term ‘illegal settlements’ in the West Bank has heartened every anti-Semite in the world. As the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has pointed out, ‘the cumulative effect of such punitive policies is to further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews’. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband have chosen to make the lives of our Jewish citizens less safe by applying a double standard to the conduct of the world’s only Jewish state and endorsing a campaign driven by those who single out Jews as uniquely evil.
Mr Miliband’s actions are nothing if not political, designed to cheer voters in one particular constituency
That is far from the only problem with what the Foreign Secretary announced on Tuesday, but it is the most troubling. Since the massacre of 7 October 2023, when more Jews lost their lives than on any day since the Holocaust, there has been a global upsurge in anti-Semitism. Not just rhetoric, though that has been escalating and hateful, but physical violence. In the United Kingdom, synagogues have been targeted on holy days, worshippers murdered, ambulances firebombed and citizens assaulted on the street.
That violence has been accompanied by a political campaign which has sought to isolate Israel as an ‘apartheid’ regime responsible for a ‘genocide’ in Gaza. The world’s only Jewish state has been depicted as a cradle of violence, a cauldron of hate, a carrier of the virus of colonialism, a renegade among nations, an enemy to civilised values. Israel has been delegitimised, and in the process, Jews have been dehumanised.
One of the most energetic manifestations of this movement has been the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which has argued that there must be penalties applied to Israeli enterprises and citizens for the collective sins of the Jewish state. The instigators of the BDS campaign have made it clear that they are not interested in a two-state solution; they want the end of Israel. Mr Miliband says he disagrees with them, but then applies boycotts, divestment and sanctions to Israeli enterprises and citizens, and those who work with them.
Mr Miliband says his sanctions are selective – they apply only to goods from certain postcodes. His position is that there are good Jews and bad Jews, and only the bad ones, and their enablers, will be punished. That may be a distinction they enjoy making in the Foreign Office. But for protestors on the streets of London and in the hearts of anti-Semites everywhere, the direction is clear. The Jews are in the dock.
It is not as though the sanctions Mr Miliband has announced will advance his stated aims. They will not halt or impede settlement building or expansion. They will only consolidate support for those in Israel who are inclined to reject any diplomatic overtures from the United Kingdom. Any economic knock they do cause will disproportionately affect Palestinian workers in the West Bank.
As Jon Mendelsohn, the Labour peer and former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has pointed out on our website, this is a performative exercise which seeks to use UK weight to bear down on Israel, while no equivalent mechanisms are deployed to push Palestinian leaders towards peace. Indeed, the most significant UK response following the violence by Hamas on 7 October was to recognise Palestinian statehood – a move Hamas used to signal to the Palestinian people that their massacre had achieved what patient state-building could not. As Hugh Gaitskell’s wife said of another Labour leader’s speech, in a different context, all the wrong people are cheering.
And Mr Miliband’s actions are nothing if not political, designed to cheer voters in one particular constituency. Since 7 October, there have been voices within Labour increasingly concerned that they have been losing votes to their left because they have been insufficiently harsh towards Israel. The Green party has made Gaza its cause and Israel its enemy. The successful campaign the Greens ran in the Gorton and Denton by-election was designed to appeal to disaffected radicals and those within the Muslim community susceptible to anti-Israel rhetoric and action. They aim to reassemble the Corbyn coalition behind the Polanski party.
Andy Burnham, political to his fingertips, has sought to staunch that flow of support away from Labour. He chose, even before becoming Prime Minister, to signal that his premiership would be harder and flintier towards Israel than Keir Starmer’s. He has been as good as his word. Expect the decision announced by Mr Miliband on Tuesday to feature in the campaign material Labour produces as it seeks to hold what was Starmer’s seat in the forthcoming by-election in Holborn and St Pancras – against Zack Polanski.
So after the statement on Tuesday, the lives of British citizens will be less safe against racial hate while Labour’s prospects of winning an electoral contest in north London are improved. Politics always involves trade-offs, but they are seldom quite this sordid.
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