Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the renowned Israeli philosopher, scientist and Orthodox Jewish intellectual, warned that using Judaism to sanctify political action corrupts religion and shields political power from moral judgment. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s defense of Britain’s new sanctions against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is an almost perfect illustration of this.
Miliband did not begin his statement to Parliament with law, evidence or policy. He began with his Jewishness. He called himself “a proud British Jew,” invoked the grandmother to whom Israel gave sanctuary, remembered the grandfather and 60 other relatives murdered by the Nazis and recalled picking oranges on the kibbutz where his cousins lived.
Only after surrounding himself with the moral authority of Jewish suffering did Miliband announce an import ban, restrictions upon Jewish homes and businesses and the “full force of U.K. sanctions” against those who finance or facilitate Jewish development beyond the Green Line. His ancestry was not the argument. It was the armor placed around the argument.
Miliband’s Jewishness is real. Its political relevance is not. Does Jewish birth establish the justice of a boycott? Do murdered relatives confer upon their descendant a hereditary license to punish Jewish families who committed no offense?
A Jew can impose an unjust policy upon other Jews as readily as any other statesman. Ancestry is not absolution. Memory is not immunity. The dead of Miliband’s family deserve remembrance; they must not be conscripted into a British campaign against the living.
The policy’s defenders inadvertently confessed the purpose of this ancestral credential. A sympathetic Guardian analysis declared that Miliband’s Jewish heritage placed him in a “near unimpeachable position” to act. Why should any minister be unimpeachable? Evidence should establish legitimacy, law should define limits and equal treatment should determine morality. Jewish parentage supplies none of these. It merely makes an anti-Jewish double standard more difficult to name.
A Guardian analysis revealed that previous U.K. Foreign Office policy permitted sanctions against entities linked to violence but did not permit punishment of a contractor merely for working in an Israeli community. Miliband overturned that caution. His proposed regime reaches construction, advertising, financing, insurance and ordinary commerce.
What evidence connects the vintner, date farmer, grocer, builder or banker to a violent act? Where are the charges, hearings or findings of individual responsibility? Residence supplies the verdict; commerce becomes complicity. A policy does not cease to discriminate against Jews merely because it replaces their name with their postal address.
The phrase “illegal settlements” performs the remainder of the deception. It compresses a disputed territory, a nonbinding advisory opinion, a negotiated interim agreement and hundreds of thousands of individual lives into two words of predetermined guilt. Once the adjective is affixed to a community, its house is no longer a home but an illegal structure; its mortgage becomes financing for crime; its produce becomes contraband. First erase the community, then criminalize the abstraction that replaces it.
The Oslo Accords did not make Jewish residence a crime. The 1995 interim agreement expressly reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for permanent-status negotiations. It left Area C under Israeli civil and security authority pending a final agreement. It neither ordered Jewish communities dismantled nor authorized London to decide their fate by boycott. Whatever Britain believes about the broader international law controversy, it cannot honestly claim that Oslo settled a question Oslo explicitly deferred. Britain invokes the peace process while abolishing its negotiating mechanism.
Even the vocabulary is an exercise in arrested history. The “Green Line” was an armistice demarcation drawn in 1949, not an international border. The Israel-Jordan armistice agreement explicitly declared that it was not intended to prejudice future boundaries. “West Bank” is the surviving geographic language of Jordanian rule over the land west of the Jordan River that the country occupied and annexed. Jordan relinquished its claim to the territory in 1988. Wars, treaties, Oslo and the creation of Areas A, B and C followed. Britain remains trapped before them all. A green pencil wielded after one war becomes, nearly eight decades later, the instrument by which Jewish life is declared illicit.
What of the violence used to justify this sanctions regime? Individual Jewish criminals should be arrested, tried and punished. That elementary principle exposes, rather than excuses, Britain’s policy. Palestinian terrorism produces sanctions against identified terrorists. Alleged Jewish violence produces sanctions against an entire Jewish community. Palestinian guilt remains individual; Jewish guilt becomes communal.
Miliband is like King Herod, who converted Jewish legitimacy into an instrument of political survival.
The omitted chronology is murderous. On Sept. 20, Palestinian gunfire killed Netanel Shukrun, a father of six, at a spring near Neve Tzuf as he prepared for Yom Kippur with his eldest son. Three days later, a Palestinian assailant drove into Neria Leiter, the son of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, leaving him critically wounded. Leiter’s brother had already been killed fighting Hamas in Gaza. Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office stated that Palestinian attacks in Judea and Samaria were occurring at an average rate of one every two hours. Yet Miliband’s moral accounting has no column for these Jews.
Nor were the attacks isolated. During September, Israeli authorities reported that it had disrupted imminent shooting attacks, uncovering a terrorist network of more than 30 members, seizing weapons and dismantling workshops used to manufacture them. Palestinian assaults, thefts, vandalism and attempted infiltrations are the atmosphere in which Jewish communities live. Much of the daily intimidation never reaches the foreign press; some is never reported because residents have learned to regard official futility as part of life. Such context excuses no vigilante. It demolishes the fiction that history begins at the instant a Jew reacts.
Why, then, is there no corresponding economic regime against institutions operating under the Palestinian Authority while attacks continue? Why are Palestinian businesses not sanctioned for sharing territory with terrorists? Why are Arab banks, builders and property advertisements spared geographic culpability?
Miliband promises Israel the “full force” of sanctions while merely urging the Palestinian Authority to accelerate reform. Britain understands that the crimes of individual Palestinians do not justify punishing every family. It abandons that principle only when the population marked for punishment is Jewish.
The policy’s audience is also domestic. At his Labour Party’s conference, Miliband addressed those angered by Palestinian suffering with the words, “We hear you. You were right.” He promised to “disrupt supply lines” involving British finance, construction and services. The militarized phrase was directed not at a terrorist arsenal but at civilian commerce.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch identified the calculation plainly: Labour’s fixation upon Israel had less to do with peace in the Middle East than with keeping peace inside the party. Jewish ancestry supplied the shield, Jewish communities supplied the sacrifice, and domestic progressive politics supplied the reward.
French President Emmanuel Macron supplied the intellectual corollary when he told the United Nations that Hamas has “never operated” in Judea and Samaria. In fact, Hamas has maintained networks and committed innumerable attacks there. Only two days earlier, Shukrun, who also held French citizenship, had been murdered. A French official later claimed Macron meant only that Hamas did not govern the territory.
But governance was not the question. Terrorism was. First, terrorist infrastructure is ignored; then a Western president announces that it never existed; finally, a Western foreign secretary punishes the Jewish communities terrorism is intended to attack.
The selectivity becomes grotesque when placed beside Britain’s conduct elsewhere. Britain is a guarantor power in Cyprus, retains sovereign bases there and rejects the legitimacy of Turkish control of the island’s north. Yet it imposes no comparable quarantine upon Turkish commerce. China crushes Tibet and extinguishes Hong Kong’s promised autonomy while Britain discovers no equivalent passion for prohibiting every business that sustains civilian life under Chinese rule. Jewish construction in territory whose final status is reserved for negotiation uniquely awakens Britain’s appetite for collective economic penalties.
The hypocrisy is clear: Israel is investigated, instructed, threatened and sanctioned. Palestinian terrorism is contextualized, minimized and forgotten. Jewish self-defense becomes an international crisis; the violence necessitating it becomes background noise. At what point does a double standard applied continuously and almost exclusively to the Jewish state cease to be mere inconsistency? At what point must one acknowledge the ancient prejudice from which it draws its appetite?
Miliband may imagine that Jewish ancestry places him within the moral inheritance of King David. But David did not become David through ancestry alone. He defended Israel when others retreated. Miliband is more like King Herod, who possessed the title and splendor of Jewish kingship, yet governed as Rome’s dependent and converted Jewish legitimacy into an instrument of political survival.
Public figures shouldn’t be judged by ancestry or self-description but by those they defend, the penalties they impose and the constituencies whose applause they seek.
Miliband begins with Jewish dead and ends with Jewish dead. Between them, he places Jewish life under economic sanction. He may cloak himself in the suffering of his family, but the cloak cannot conceal the policy beneath it. It is not evidence. It is not justice. It is a political alibi.
