The ethnic cleansers of Whitehall
Melanie Phillips
Britain’s “as-a-Jew” foreign secretary is a disgrace to his people.
Ed Miliband, U.K. Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, arriving for a meeting at 10 Downing Street, July 6, 2024. Credit: Simon Dawson/Prime Minister of the United Kingdom via Wikimedia Commons.
The madness that has engulfed so much of the West since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has now consumed Britain.
Anxious to reset government policy to turn public outrage at politicians into adoration of the Labour Party, the United Kingdom’s rookie prime minister, Andy Burnham, decided to reset relations with the State of Israel by sending them into the deep freeze.
Declaring that an economic boycott of the Israeli “settlements” would enable Britain to “stand up for its values,” Burnham has instead defined the values of the Labour Party as the promotion of lies, defamation and Jew-hate.
Announcing the boycott to a chilling chorus of cheering members of parliament, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, proceeded to misstate international law, defame Israeli Jews living in the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria as committing “rampant settler terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing,” and libel Israel as causing the “totally avoidable humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip.
This was a tissue of wicked falsehoods and distortions. Neither the Israeli settlements nor the “occupation” are illegal under international law, whatever the kangaroo court run by the systemically anti-Israel United Nations may say.
It was obviously an outrageous inversion of reality to blame Israel for Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe rather than Hamas, which used civilians as cannon fodder while Israel went to unprecedented lengths to supply them with aid that Hamas then stole.
As for “settler violence,” this is the latest libel to delegitimize Israel as a prelude to its destruction. There is a problem of unprovoked Jewish violence against Arabs in the “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria, but this is committed by at most a few hundred delinquent and nihilistic youths who hate both Arabs and the State of Israel.
They are a tiny minority of the half million Jews living in these areas, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, upstanding people.
Far from being “settler terrorists,” as Miliband claimed, they’re under constant attack by local Arabs. Rocks are thrown at Israelis in their cars; Jewish farmers are having their fields torched and their flocks stolen; Jewish shepherds are finding their goats have been poisoned to death.
In the past few days, a Jewish “settler” was stabbed on a farm and seriously wounded. Over the years, dozens of Israelis in these areas have been murdered.
None of this is reported in Britain. The government’s response to this institutionalized terrorism against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria is to trash their good name and then subject them all to collective punishment.
Like so many Jews with a tangential or non-existent connection to Judaism, he believes such lies to be unchallengeably true because his real religion is the creed of the left.
The charge that they are perpetrating ethnic cleansing of the Arabs is grotesque. In fact, it’s the Burnham government that’s demanding the ethnic cleansing of every Jew from their own land to create a fantasy state of Palestine that wouldn’t have a single Jew in it.
These sanctions will do no significant damage to Israel’s economy. But they’re certainly not “just symbolic,” as Britain told the Trump administration to head off any possible blowback.
Their real sting lies in the further demonization of Israel, a principal strategy in the Palestinian Arab and Islamist war to destroy the Jewish state.
By framing the “settlers” as terrorists involved in ethnic cleansing and unlawful occupation, Miliband has cemented the image of Israel as uniquely evil. This will further galvanize the Islamists, already delirious that their campaign to reframe Israel in the Western mind as the worst country in the world has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Indeed, both Hamas and the Iranian regime have been purring with pleasure over Miliband’s statement.
As he defamed Israel and laid out how it would be punished for the crime of refusing to commit suicide, Miliband made an issue of one point in particular: his Jewishness.
The left-wing Miliband—the son of the prominent Marxist historian, Shoah survivor and militant atheist Ralph Miliband—has a tenuous, confused and fraught relationship with Judaism.
He started his statement by announcing that he was a “proud British Jew.” That came as a surprise to many. Obviously, he was using his Jewish identity to protect himself against the inevitable charge that what he was promulgating was—as U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee described this boycott—“Jew-hate.”
Worse still, he used the Holocaust and his murdered family as a shield behind which to lob his volleys of libels against the Jewish state, thus abusing the sacred memory of every Jew who was slaughtered in that all-too real genocide.
His statement certainly amounted to Jew-hate because, through its lies and distortions depicting Israel as positively evil, it subjected the Jewish state to malevolent behavior not used against any other country.
That’s exactly how Jews have always been treated by those intent upon their removal from the world. Laundering this derangement as purported “criticism” of Israel no longer passes any smell test.
Miliband thus joins a tragically long line of Jews throughout history who have led the pack in inciting hatred and attacks against the Jewish people.
These include Karl Marx, who envisaged a perfect society that would contain no Jews, and the 12th-century English convert from Judaism, Theodore of Cambridge, who spread the blood libel that Jews were killing gentile children to drink their blood.
They also include Tiberius Julius Alexander, the Roman general from a prominent Egyptian Jewish family, whose troops in 66 C.E. slaughtered 50,000 Jews in their homeland of Judea—the same Judea that Miliband so ludicrously described as “illegally occupied” by Jews.
Their direct successors are today’s Jews on the left in Britain and America, such as those involved with Yachad, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Israel, anti-Zionist groups. These are doing the dirty work of the Israel-exterminators for them by parroting the lies and distortions intended to delegitimize and destroy the Jewish state.
Burnham’s motivation for sanctioning the “settlements” is political; he aims to appease both the hard left and Britain’s increasingly powerful Muslim bloc.
But there are many in his party and in wider progressive circles who not only believe that the preposterous rubbish they spout about Israel is true, but who—appallingly—equate this with conscience and morality. That includes Jews on the left like Miliband. All believe the lethal fantasy that anti-Jewish and anti-Israel ideologies promote peace, social justice and the brotherhood of mankind.
Miliband maintains that these sanctions won’t increase attacks on Jews because he believes he’s simply attacking Israel’s excesses, which all decent Jews like him should oppose. In fact, those presumed excesses are all propaganda libels designed to depict Israel as utterly diabolical, emanating from the hard left and the Palestinian Arabs.
Yet those are the very people Miliband chose to listen to before constructing his package of lies. He talked to Yachad and also took advice from the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammed Mustafa, and the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Husam Zomlot.
It would never have occurred to him to sanction these men for tyrannizing Palestinian Arab dissidents, supporting and rewarding terrorists, and teaching their community’s children that their highest calling is to murder Jews and steal their land. Instead, Miliband parroted their Orwellian propaganda as truths.
Like so many Jews with a tangential or non-existent connection to Judaism, he believes such lies to be unchallengeably true because his real religion is the creed of the left.
And because such people are Jews, their promotion of these lies convinces many that they must therefore be true. This process is also influencing increasing numbers of young Jews in Britain and America to turn against Israel.
The damage being done by these “as a Jew” foes of Israel is immeasurable. The Jewish community should treat them as pariahs. But in Britain, groups like Yachad are actually embraced by the Jewish establishment.
Jews are rightly very wary of sectarian splits. But we’re not talking here about theological arguments over the role of religious authority. We’re looking at Jews who have adopted the exterminatory agenda of the enemies of Israel and who are therefore endangering the entire Jewish people.
It’s time the Jewish community woke up to the vipers in their midst, who are undermining not just Israel but Judaism itself, and threw them out.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, has just been published by Wicked Son. Her previous book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, was published in 2025. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
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