Britain’s House of Commons has been the place where many outstanding speeches have been delivered.
The September 8 statement of policy that Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs Edward Miliband delivered was most certainly not one of them.
In fact, it was not only an embarrassing presentation of lies in place of facts, but he made assertions about the future which are unsubstantiated.
Worse, he predicated Britain’s new policy decision on his being Jewish, saying, “I do so as a proud British Jew.”
He then continued, expressing “the deepest gratitude to the State of Israel for giving a home to my grandmother” after she lost her husband and 60 other family members at the hands of the Nazis.
Complacently and blindly, in declaring sanctions to force Israel to accept a political solution Israel has decided for itself that would endanger its very survival, a solution the Arab side has itself rejected for at least 90 years, he ignores the distinct probability that he is facilitating a version of Islamist Nazism in its goals to eliminate the Jewish state he once picked oranges in at a kibbutz.
The veterans of that kibbutz, Nahshonim, just south of Rosh Ha’ayin, could surely relate to Miliband, if they didn’t when he visited, to the dangers they faced in the early 1950s.
In that decade, Israel did not possess any “occupied territory” of the “West Bank.” And yet infiltrators from Jordan caused havoc, crossing the former Green Line, stealing livestock and crops, and also murdering Israeli civilians.
As Abba Eban declared in his British-accented English to his Der Spiegel interviewer, those 1967 lines carried “something of an Auschwitz memory” regarding Israel’s existential vulnerability.
For Miliband to state, “if there is one lesson of recent decades, it is that we will never have stability in the Middle East without a two-state solution,” is displaying abject ignorance.
Miliband should know that, by demanding, by force of sanctions, that Israel return to that period of topographical nightmare, without detailing the solutions to Israel’s security needs, as if they even exist in 2026 after October 7 and Hamas’ invasion from Gaza, he is prepping another Arab chance at their own version of a holocaust.
Jake Wallis-Simpson is correct in his comment, on the spiked magazine website, that Labour has committed a “shameful surrender to the anti-Israel mob… sacrificing the UK’s economic and security interests to appease an anti-Zionist fringe.”
Blogger/activist Jonathan Hoffman noted that Miliband was being a “disgrace” – not only for using charged inflammatory language but basing himself on “stories” he was told by unidentified “human-rights activists.” The kingdom’s cabinet is but a branch of the Labour Friends of Palestine.
Simon Schama, the historian, tweeted that the sanctions “will certainly help Netanyahu’s election chances, perhaps decisively,” but he received some oppositional feedback on that aspect.
Nevertheless, the British move surely assists Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s possibility of, if not gaining votes, retaining those who would, at the least, remain within the bloc of right-wing parties as they see a threat to Israel’s security and rights to its homeland.
A sharper criticism was penned by Lord Jon Mendelsohn in The Spectator on September 8. He saw problems in that Miliband’s policy does not deal with the actual violence that is preventing peace.
There is no reference to who disarms Hamas or prevents the rebuilding of its military infrastructure. Neither is there a plan to ensure that a future Palestinian state possesses a monopoly of legitimate force and that that “security guarantee” is “capable of sustaining Israeli withdrawal.”
A second all-Arab Islamist state in historic Palestine as proposed, the first being the monarchical and dictatorial Jordan, true ethno-nationalist states the progressive camp fulminates over when they reference Israel, while Israel yields territory but maintains its not insignificant Arab minority, is patently a recipe for continued violence rather than peace.
Can we at least solve Gaza first? That was, in essence, a two-state solution paradigm, and we have witnessed the calamitous failure of that idea.
Perhaps applying sanctions to persons, businesses, banks, and governing institutions that support anti-Jewish Arab terror? If not in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, then at least in the United Kingdom?
If Britain is struggling with anti-Jewish violence and refusing to deal with the underlying prop-ups of the shootings, stabbings, and the fire bombings, is it not hubris to presume the Arab wars against Israel are a problem England can solve with sanctions on Israel?
Recipe for disaster
Miliband's crutch of declaring himself a “good Jew” with a good Jewish family in Israel, while admitting he is an atheist with a non-Jewish wife, is an unworthy trick of seeking to lull Jews into trusting his policy.
Despite him being “proud of my Jewishness and unwavering in my support for the state of Israel,” there is very much a contradiction between that and support for the state of Palestine, as he posited.
I, too, am a proud Jew, and I proudly suggest to Miliband and to Andy Burnham that it’s about time that supporters of an Arab Palestine realize that Jewish rights must be acknowledged, among them Jewish national identity and our historic national home, as the League of Nations decided in 1922 and as Lord Balfour wrote in 1917.
Proposed solutions that ignore the roots of Arab violence, their rejectionism, their jihadist mentality, and their anti-Jewish sentiment are a recipe for disaster.
Calumnies such as “ethnic cleansing,” “dehumanization,” and “settler terrorism,” even if quoting Israeli political figures, are not, as such, true.
“Jewish settlement” in the land where Jews lived for millennia, since at least 1250 BCE, is a natural right, and the League of Nations recognized it as such.
Britain and its government have erred terribly. How long until the error is realized and corrected?
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.