“Here, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you.” (Leon Neal/Getty)
If their self-proclamations are anything to go by, two of the proudest Jews in Britain right now are the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, and Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party. One seems to know what being a proud Jew might entail. One doesn’t. So let’s stay with the one who does, pausing only to note that Zack Polanski is a nom de théâtre and Edward Samuel Miliband chose to keep the name he was born with.
Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.
Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.
“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….
So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.
I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.
So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?
You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.
Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.
There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?
Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.