“I don’t go to synagogue.”
So said the British Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, during an interview with the BBC the day after he announced a package of sanctions and other punitive measures against Israel, sending relations between London and Jerusalem into a nosedive.
Miliband, who is Jewish, made this admission when the BBC presenter Justin Webb asked him whether he would be attending synagogue over Rosh Hashanah, “as many British Jews will be, many of whom will feel less safe. … What do you say to them, to individuals. Are you going?”
When Miliband responded that he wasn’t, Webb countered: “Isn’t that then the point? That actually for a lot of British Jews, they really feel this; they have to have security duties at synagogues. They know that there have been violent attacks, and that is why when [UK Chief Rabbi] Ephraim Mirvis uses those words they mean an awful lot to them and perhaps, frankly, less to you.”
The chief rabbi’s words referred to by Webb were stark, issued after Miliband laid out his plans before the House of Commons. The measures marked “truly a dark day for British Jews,” Mirvis said. Webb, who is not Jewish, clearly understands that while Miliband may be “of” the Jewish community, he is not “in” it.
Had Miliband not highlighted his Jewish origins during his parliamentary speech, there would be no need to pass judgement on this exchange. In free and democratic societies, religious observance is a private matter. Whether you attend synagogue—or church, or mosque or temple—is, or should be, entirely up to you.
A “dark day” for British Jews and for Israel.
However, Miliband made sure to tell his parliamentary colleagues that he is a “proud British Jew, someone with the deepest gratitude to the State of Israel for giving a home to my grandmother after she lost her husband, my grandfather, and 60 other family members at the hands of the Nazis.” He is content to invoke his Judaism when it suits him for political purposes, but as Webb demonstrated, in a country that recorded nearly 2,000 antisemitic incidents in the first six months of this year alone, Miliband is sufficiently removed from the Jewish community to have little understanding or empathy with what its members are going through.
Mirvis was correct. Miliband’s announcement was indeed a “dark day” for British Jews and for Israel as well. For all the foreign secretary’s talk of his Jewish pride, his condemnation of the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, and his insistence that the existence of the State of Israel is not up for debate, the fact remains that his package targets Israel alone.
Goods produced by Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are being banned. Companies and individuals that provide financial or other services to these communities face sanctions. Critically—and stupidly, given the United Kingdom’s extensive use of both Israeli intelligence and Israeli weapons technology—Miliband has also said that license applications for arms exports will be rejected for as long as the “occupation” lasts.
No matter the degree to which he sugarcoats his words with assurances of his personal affection for Israel and reminders of his Jewish identity, Miliband’s message to Jerusalem is an unremittingly hostile one. It is a particularly acute example of a trend visible in other Western countries, including the United States: the insertion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, uniquely among all international conflicts, into domestic politics, powered by an extremely vocal and increasingly influential foreign-backed lobby that promotes the goals of Hamas using the slogan “Free Palestine.”
That the United Kingdom should be something of a pioneer in this regard is no surprise.
Britain has had a long and often tortuous relationship with both the land of Israel and the Jewish people since the days of the Plantagenet kings. For more than a century, it has, by turns, supported the Zionist movement only to then throw obstacles in its way.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, which looked “with favor” on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in mandatory Palestine, was followed in 1939 by a White Paper that severely restricted Jewish immigration into the Land of Israel on the literal eve of the Shoah. In 1956, Israel was part of a tripartite alliance with France and the UK in the botched war against Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser; by 1973, when Israel was facing land invasions by Arab armies on all of its borders, the UK was declaring an arms embargo on the Jewish state, even preventing U.S. aircraft engaged in resupplying the Israelis from using British bases in Cyprus.
A fair-weather friend who cannot be trusted is not much of a friend. And there is another layer to this as well: As the scholar Anthony Julius pointed out in his indispensable history of English antisemitism, Trials of the Diaspora, the early British engagement with Zionism coupled with its League of Nations mandate over Palestine meant that “anti-Zionist positions tainted by antisemitism” had been established in British political discourse by the end of World War I. “In the matter of antisemitic anti-Zionism, then, England arrived first,” wrote Julius, “even though the more proximate origin of contemporary global antisemitic anti-Zionism may be found in the Soviet polemics of the post-World War II period.”
For now, only the United States stands apart from the United Kingdom and other democratic allies determined to cajole, harass and compel Israel into agreeing to a Palestinian state on its borders. That will likely cause transatlantic tensions, much as it did in the past.
In April 1946, according to U.S. State Department records of the meeting, then-British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, like Miliband a Labour Party politician, complained to U.S Secretary of State James Byrnes about American Jews financially backing the efforts of the Yishuv to create an independent Jewish state. “During the course of his remarks, Mr. Bevin asserted that the Jews through their aggressive attitude were ‘poisoning relations between our two peoples,’” the record stated.
One wonders whether Ed Miliband may find himself articulating similar sentiments to American officials in the coming weeks and months. That will depend in part on how the United States reacts to the British sanctions on Israel. Weakening our key ally in the region absolutely runs counter to American interests and should be implacably opposed.
That is the message Washington should be delivering to London and all other capitals.
