It’s not quite the same as being a little bit pregnant, but Andy Burnham’s call on Thursday for the Green Party leadership to commit to reversing their ‘Zionism is racism’ vote is as near as dammit the political equivalent.
The prime minister said, quite rightly, that the motion was “a completely wrong decision” that effectively ruled out a two-state solution. “For that reason, it shouldn’t be supported in any way, shape or form. I would call on the leadership of the Green Party to say that it will be reversed and it won’t be Green Party policy.”
That’s certainly a good reason to reject it. I’m also willing to credit Burnham with believing what I think is the main reason, even though he hasn’t actually said it for himself: that the motion commits the Greens to Jew hate as part of its platform. (JC readers really don’t need me to elaborate on why it is deeply antisemitic; we will take that as read.) I have my differences with the prime minister and his government on Israel, but I accept that he considers that Israel has a right to exist, and that Jews who go to synagogue aren’t racist even though we say a prayer for the state of Israel.
But that’s the little bit pregnant bit. Because while Burnham may accept all that in theory, in practise the difference between the government and the Greens is one of degree.
For decades the UK and Israel were close allies. Of course we had our differences, but fundamentally both of us knew not only that we were on the same side, but that our closeness worked to huge mutual advantage. That relationship ground to a juddering halt in July 2024, when the Labour government decided that appeasing the sectarian Muslim vote here was more important than working with one of our closest allies. From the day the government took office, it set about – deliberately, as a matter of policy – alienating Israel, whether it was by restoring funding to Unrwa, the UN aid body which employed some of the October 7 terrorists, by withdrawing the previous government’s objection with Germany to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and then most notoriously by rewarding Hamas for its massacre through the recognition of a Palestinian state, thus allowing the terrorists to claim they had been able to deliver something negotiations had never managed.
But however bad things were – deliberately so, remember – under Starmer, the appointment of Ed Miliband has taken things to a different level. Burnham appears to have little real interest (at least for now) in foreign affairs, so his foreign secretary is an even more significant appointment than usual.
And Miliband is the man who as Labour leader refused to back action against Assad, condemning thousands of Syrians to murder and who as foreign secretary has happily shaken hands with the foreign minister of Iran – despite that regime plotting a series of murders of British citizens on British soil, as well as even more terrorist outrages. For Miliband, the real enemy is the Israeli government, and so he has introduced a series of sanctions against Israel. Labour’s policy is clear: to do as much diplomatic and economic damage to Israel as possible without taking military action.
Like Burnham, Miliband believes that Israel has a right to exist. Indeed, he began his now notorious Commons statement announcing sanctions by talking about how it gave a home to his grandmother “after she lost her husband, my grandfather, and 60 other family members at the hands of the Nazis. I remember visiting her in the 1970s in Tel Aviv and seeing the life and the sanctuary Israel had provided. Indeed, some of my most joyful childhood memories were picking oranges as a kid on the kibbutz where my cousins lived.”
But that belief in Israel’s right to exist is about as far as things go.
It’s not just sanctions and policy: much of what Miliband says could have been written by Hamas. In his Labour conference speech last month, for example, he attacked “ethnic cleansing” and “war crimes in Gaza” – and in the same speech belittled the threat Israel faces, saying it “cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank.” Likewise, Burnham told the UN General Assembly on September 22 that “far too little aid” is getting into Gaza despite ample evidence to the contrary.
And the big difference with the Greens is that Labour is in power; while Polanski et al can only shout about Israel, Labour can actively go after it. In that context, one has to ask whether we are getting the Greens’ antisemitism out of proportion. Isn’t the worse villain here the government which is actually acting to punish Israel for defending itself?
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