Burnham has decided to throw British Jews under the bus

Then there is Ali Milani, chair of the Labour Muslim Network, who worked closely with Burnham in the run-up to his leadership win and is, according to the Spectator, tipped for a communications role in Number 10. Milani has apologised for tweeting, as a teenager, that 9/11 was a “false flag” the US government “knew of in advance”, and for telling a Jewish critic online that a disagreement would “cost you a pound #jew”. He signed a 2015 letter defending an organisation whose head of research had called the Isis executioner known as Jihadi John “a beautiful young man”. He has campaigned against the use of the word “Islamism” itself, calling it racist.

Add Wes Streeting, barely two days into the job of Defence Secretary, telling the country he “fears Israel has fallen short” of British military standards in Gaza – a judgement the former army chief Richard Dannatt suggested he was in no position to make, given that Streeting “knows pretty much the square root of nothing about defence”.

Add Burnham’s own pre-office statement, apologising for Labour’s response to Gaza as “too slow” and complaining of “too little aid” getting in – delivered three days after the UN’s own deputy coordinator for the Middle East, Dr Ramiz Alakbarov, confirmed that Hamas forces had stormed a food distribution point in Jabalia, raided a World Food Programme warehouse and assaulted two aid-truck drivers. That statement was public. It was available to the man about to become Prime Minister. He left it out.

None of this is an isolated slip. Each is a choice: the Solicitor General with the Hamas photograph; the prospective Number 10 hire with the “false flag” tweet; a Defence Secretary lecturing Israel on standards he cannot define; and, this week, Jeremy Corbyn telling Newsnight he has had “a very pleasant conversation, very pleasant chat” with Burnham. Nobody in Downing Street has explained why the Prime Minister is taking friendly calls from a man expelled from his own party for its failure to tackle antisemitism under his leadership. It isn’t the biggest item on this list. It’s simply one more item on it. Taken together, they tell you exactly where the pressure inside this government is coming from, and who is expected to absorb the cost of relieving it.

Sadiq Khan appears to have been emboldened by the new government’s tone too. Following New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani,  Khan told Channel 4 News he would want Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he visited London, branding him “a perpetrator of genocide” and declaring that “people who commit genocide are not welcome in London”. It is also worth separately noticing what Khan does not rush to do. When Hatzola’s ambulances were torched in Golders Green, he visited a different depot the next day. When synagogues were firebombed by suspected Iranian-linked arsonists in April, he was nowhere to be seen, and it was left to the Metropolitan Police to hold the press conference outside the targeted synagogue. When two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green weeks later, Khan again did not appear. He finds the cameras easily enough when there is a foreign leader to threaten. 

I want to be fair about one thing. In the aftermath of the Heaton Park Synagogue attack, Burnham did what a leader of Greater Manchester is supposed to do: he showed up, said the right words, and stood with the community he represents. I don’t doubt his sincerity in that moment. But I am tired of watching politicians collect praise from our community and organisations for doing the baseline of their job. Nobody should thank a mayor for visiting the scene of a terrorist attack in his own city, because that is simply what the job requires. The real test of whether a leader takes British Jews seriously is not what he says the week after a synagogue is attacked. It is what he does in the months in between, when there are no cameras and no political cost attached to getting it right. On that test, this government is failing before it has properly begun.

Because that is what this actually is. Labour has run the numbers and decided that British Jews are a small enough community to be sacrificed for a much larger, and to them far more electorally valuable, section of the electorate. We are being thrown under the bus so this government can keep faith with voters it rates more highly than us. That is not a metaphor I use loosely: it will lead, eventually, to Jews being pushed under buses in a far less figurative sense, as the antisemites already marching through our cities take a government that treats their worldview as reasonable for the green light it is. Labour should also understand that this calculation is not just shameful. It is stupid. Movements built on escalating demands do not reward partial compliance; they punish it for not being enough. Keir Starmer discovered that when recognising “Palestinian statehood” didn’t save his premiership. Burnham’s capitulation will cost this government exactly what it costs us, and it will not save him either.

Which is what makes the individual cases sting more, not less. Wes Streeting spent years as one of the most reliable voices in Parliament on Holocaust education. He knew my great-grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, and for years was a genuine and vocal opponent of antisemitism, long before this war made such positions politically expensive. Watching him now calculate that his own political survival depends on distancing himself from Israel and the Jewish community tells you something larger: not just where he and his party believe the votes have gone, but that neither of them is prepared to go anywhere near the distance actually required to fix the predicament our community now finds itself in.

And lastly, there is Ed Miliband. From the moment he was appointed Foreign Secretary, his Jewishness was folded into how the role was framed, so that his own judgements start to read as establishing the Jewish position on this war, when in reality he speaks only for himself, and does so as a communal outsider. Under Corbyn, while Ian Austin, Louise Ellman, John Mann and Luciana Berger paid a real price for confronting antisemitism in their own party, Miliband said nothing from the backbenches. He is entitled to hold whatever view he likes. He is not entitled to have it stand in for ours.

There is a strategic case here too and it’s worth making plainly because this government doesn’t seem to have grasped it. Britain supplies less than one per cent of Israel’s defence imports, while, as Rafael Advanced Defence Systems’ chairman Yuval Steinitz told the Spectator, Israeli technology already runs through the British armed forces: the Watchkeeper drone derives from Elbit’s Hermes 450, the Army’s Jaguar patrol vehicles are IAI-designed, Rafael’s Litening pods equip the RAF’s Typhoons, and David’s Sling defends Nato allies in Europe. Restricting arms to Israel while Iran and its proxies remain fully armed does not produce balance. It disarms one side of a war and leaves the other’s supply lines untouched. Steinitz’s own description of what that policy risks was blunt: it “paves the way for the destruction of Israel”.

None of this requires pretending Israel’s conduct in this war has been flawless, because no war fought by any army in history has been flawless, including Britain’s own. What it does require is noticing that this government’s outrage runs in exactly one direction. It has never once demanded that Hamas disarm or stop hijacking the aid meant for its own people, even as the evidence for all three sits in the same UN reports Burnham selectively quotes from. It has plenty to say about Israeli conduct and nothing at all to say about Hamas’s. The government has made a choice to spend its entire supply of moral seriousness on one side of a war it can’t be bothered to properly understand.

British Jews have seen this film before. It rarely starts with a single dramatic betrayal. It starts with small, deniable steps, each one easy to justify on its own terms, until the pattern is undeniable and the damage is done. Andy Burnham is only a week into the job. There is still time for him to prove this pattern wrong. Nothing he has done so far suggests he intends to.

Dov Forman is a New York Times best-selling author, TIME100 content creator, and campaigns against antisemitism and promotes Holocaust education