Finally someone in high public office has had the nerve to state the obvious: that Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, is talking complete nonsense. Sadly, no one in the media seems ready to listen to Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary.
Mirvis is one of Israel’s most visible and influential cheerleaders in the UK. He has described Israeli troops serving in Gaza as “our heroic soldiers”, apparently misunderstanding that his job is to represent British, not Israeli, Jews.
The confusion may have arisen, in part, because, as Mirvis himself has admitted, one of his sons, Danny, served in the Israeli military during its three-year onslaught on Gaza.
And then there is the matter of Mirvis declaring in early 2024, weeks into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, that the slaughter of what was then at least 23,000 Palestinians – most of them civilians – was “the most outstanding possible thing”.
Among his other, many connections to Israel through family, he lived in an illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank in the 1970s while studying at a seminary.
By any reasonable yardstick, the man charged with providing religious counsel to British Jews is far from a dispassionate observer of things Israel-related. His conflict of interest is probably visible from outer space.
Yet, when Miliband set out the British government’s slightly tougher line on Israel’s illegal settlements this week – through a trade ban that will be difficult to enforce and that his officials have reportedly said will, in any case, be “largely symbolic” – none of this context about Mirvis was mentioned by the very establishment media outlets that are only too eager to quote him. Which is all of them.
It is unclear what expertise the chief rabbi has on the matter of Britain’s diplomatic relations with Israel, or on the legality of the settlements devouring the West Bank and any future Palestinian state.
But what he apparently he does have is an uncommon insight into the thinking of non-Jews. And usefully, at least for Israel, it seems that Rabbi Mirvis knows that implementing a very limited ban on the UK’s trade with Israel’s illegal settlements will unleash a new wave of antisemitism, endangering the safety of Britain’s Jewish population.
Or as Mirvis put it in a statement on social media, the UK’s sanctions are a “dark day for British Jews”, and will apparently embolden people to “use hatred as a weapon against Jews”.
It is hard not to miss a running theme with the chief rabbi’s pronouncements. Anything that threatens to limit Israel’s room for manoeuvre in committing atrocities against Palestinians will, says Mirvis, make British Jews less safe – for reasons that are never explained, and about which interviewers are always, and strangely, incurious.
Mirvis, of course, is not used to receiving even the mildest pushback from politicians or the media. Why? Because we can presume they are deeply fearful of being labelled antisemitic for questioning the rabbi’s divinely inspired insights into non-Jewish behaviour.
So Mirvis must have been startled to hear, as Miliband was asked incredulously by BBC Radio Four’s Today programme whether the chief rabbi was wrong, the foreign secretary retort: Yes, I am saying I don’t agree with the chief rabbi.“
Miliband – and behind him, Prime Minister Andy Burnham – doubtless hope that the foreign secretary can pull off this kind of rhetorical duel with the chief rabbi because Miliband has a possible get-out-of-jail card: he is as Jewish as Mirvis.
Had Miliband not been, one can assume the media would already be clamouring for his sacking – and his departure into political exile alongside former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Nonetheless, Miliband’s Jewishness may not offer complete immunity. He still risks being proclaimed the “wrong sort of Jew”. Which may explain why he hurriedly added, after criticising Mirvis, that the rabbi was “somebody over whom I have great respect.”
Understandably, the BBC’s Justin Webb was not placated. To avoid facing accusations of antisemitism himself for failing to roast Miliband sufficiently, Webb pressed on that Miliband might not be taking Mirvis’ warning seriously enough given that he did not attend synagogue.
So, it seems, Miliband is indeed the wrong sort of Jew. “Wrong” in the sense that he refuses to conflate his Jewish identity with Israel. “Wrong” in the sense that he regards human rights as universal, not an expression of dominance by one ethnic group over another. “Wrong” in the sense that he refuses to weaponise his Jewishness to silence criticism of Israel.
Yet once again, care of the BBC, Rabbi Mirvis got his way – as, of course, did Israel.
Abandoning the discussion of why Israel might need to be sanctioned over its war crimes in the West Bank – let alone its unmentionable genocide in Gaza – Miliband was forced on to the back foot.
He used what valuable air time was left to him to restate the same platitudes demanded by the Israel lobby every time Israel comes in for the faintest scrutiny. He told the Today programme: “Antisemitism is a scourge and an evil … I want Jews, I want people of all faiths and none to feel safe in our country.”
What did not get examined – what never gets examined – was the deeply flawed premise of Mirvis’ claim that British Jews would be made less safe by the UK sanctioning illegal Israeli settlements engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
The reality, it should barely need stating, is likely to be the very opposite.
The worst antisemites – the kind that, like Mirvis, confuse Jews with Israel and are therefore most likely to carry out attacks on Jews in response to crimes committed by Israel – hold a set of beliefs entirely incompatible with what Miliband has just done.
They believe a cabal of Jews – and through them, Israel – control our governments. They believe that this Jewish cabal controls the media too. They are certain the British government is incapable of making its own decisions and of punishing Israel.
Every time Rabbi Mirvis and the Israel lobby get their way; every time a journalist bows unquestioningly before Rabbi Mirvis and the Israel lobby; every time a government minister crumbles in the face of pressure from Rabbi Mirvis and the Israel lobby; such antisemites become more hardened in their certainty that they are right. They grow more sure that the only hope of bringing about change is by taking the fight to ordinary Jews as they go about their lives. That is why they attack Jews on street corners, in cafes, and in synagogues.
The rest of us understand that it is not a cabal of Jews running the world. It is rather a dark cabal of billionaires and corporations that have used their immense wealth to buy our “democracies” so that they can amass even greater wealth. Those billionaires own the establishment media – the window through which we are made to understand the world – so they can shape our minds to win our compliance. And they distract us from this reality – and further enrich themselves – by confecting endless enemies that can only be defeated by the mammoth war industries they also own.
The truth – though one no one dares admit it – is that, if anyone is making life less safe for British Jews, it is not Ed Miliband. It is the actions of Chief Rabbi Mirvis.
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