Ed Mililband’s claim about Israel blocking medicine into Gaza was incendiary – but then it was intended to be

A spokesperson for the Israeli foreign ministry pushed back sharply: ‘If the Foreign Secretary were interested in facts rather than stories, he would know that there are no restrictions whatsoever on the entry of medicines into the Gaza Strip, and that no medicines are being blocked."

The Israelis say 22,500 tonnes of medical supplies have entered Gaza since the ceasefire began and Israel continues to facilitate Palestinians travelling for medical treatment.

Some will rankle at Huckabee’s antisemitism contention. Had the British government claimed Jews were denying medicine to Gentile children, that probably plays enough into tropes of Jews as child-killers to warrant the label “Jew hate".

But Miliband, who is himself Jewish, was echoing assertions about Israel, and in our fastidious efforts to distinguish hatred of Israelis from hatred of Jews we have forgotten that Israelis, or three-quarters of them, are Jews and can also be targets of antisemitism.

Claim Jews are blood-sucking money-changers and you will be accused of antisemitism; condemn someone who claims Israelis are blood-sucking money-changers as antisemitic and you will be accused of silencing criticism of Israel.

Whatever Andy Burnham’s government might say publicly, the charge of Jew-hatred is politically useful for them. Their anti-Israel pivot, which is expected to include sanctions forbidding trade with companies that operate in Judea and Samaria, is aimed at wooing back into Labour’s electoral coalition those Muslims who abandoned the party at the 2024 election.

It’s not that Keir Starmer’s government, or Rishi Sunak’s beforehand, was effusively pro-Israel, but even the tiniest speck of empathy shown towards the Jewish state was too much for Britain’s Islamists and their fellow travellers on the third-worldist left and nativist right.

Let’s note something important before going any further: when we talk about antisemitic Muslims in Britain, we are not saying that all Muslims in Britain are antisemitic. We are saying that those who are should be treated as the severe civic problem they represent, and certainly should not be pandered to for narrow electoral advantage.

Specifically, we have in mind those Muslims in Britain who tell pollsters Jews have too much power over the financial system (39 per cent), the media (41 per cent), and government policy (46 per cent); the 39 per cent of Muslims who said in the wake of October 7 that Hamas did not commit murders or rapes, the 49 per cent who believed Israel had no right to exist as a Jewish state, and the 46 per cent who stated that they had more sympathy for Hamas than for Israel.

Labour has looked at these numbers, and scanned a fracturing electoral map that does not look encouraging for pluralist social democracy, and resolved in favour of sectarianism and appeasement. It won’t work, of course. The rise of the Gaza independents has proved that antizionist and anti-liberal Muslims no longer need Labour and can successfully apply their demographic advantage in certain constituencies to a first-past-the-post system which has seldom had to contend with ethno-religious voting outside of Northern Ireland.

By leaving the Labour coalition, these voters got the party to adopt an Israel policy much more to their liking. Why would they give up this power now? Why not organise a larger-scale exit next time and see what other policies Labour will shift on, whether LGBT education, anti-Islamism strategies, or criminalising Quran desecration? Labour blinked before. It will blink again.

Ed Miliband is right about one thing: stories matter. British companies routinely do business with both sides of territorial disputes (e.g. Turkey and Cyprus); British charities send money to settlers in "occupied territories” (e.g. Western Sahara); the British government seeks to deepen trade ties with states which can much more credibly be accused of genocide (e.g. China in Xinjiang).

But none of these are getting the Israel treatment because there are no stories there. The lobbies for Northern Cyprus and the Uyghur Muslims are pitifully small, as are those for Christian communities being wiped out by African Islamists and Afghan refugees expelled en masse by Pakistan. Without well-funded lobbies your story rarely gets heard and without getting your story heard you have no chance of moving Western governments in your direction.

Palestine has a lobby, one far better funded and more effectual than the laughably over-hyped Israel lobby, and so its stories are everywhere.

Stories have defined Gaza’s October 7 blitzkrieg on Israel and the ensuing war. Stories pumped out by the paid propagandists of the Qatari-Iranian axis, laundered by the hired help in the NGO-activist complex, broadcast to the West by a partly ideological but mostly credulous media, breathlessly repeated by politicians malevolent and midwit alike, written up with scholarly-looking footnotes by the faculty-lounge fedayeen, edited down for chanting purposes by humanities undergraduates, and injected into Gen-Z’s social feeds so the TikTok kids regard Zionism as cooked and Jews sus.

Throughout the October 7 war, stories have proved themselves the most potent weapon in 21st century armed conflict. Stories of famine and malnutrition were amplified by the United Nations, the British Foreign Office, and even some respectable organisations. The data would later debunk these narratives but by then it was too late.

Western audiences were bombarded with stories that Israel was lying about Hamas-infiltrated hospitals, that Jerusalem’s forces said they were "targeting people including medical teams and Arab speakers” at Shifa hospital, that the IDF blew up a “Press” van killing five journalists from Al-Quds Today, that Israel killed the headteacher of Deir Yassin Secondary School in al-Bass.

Westerners were not bombarded with the facts which dispelled or added vital context to these stories. That Hamas’s control of civilian hospitals has been confirmed by documents, video footage, tunnel infrastructure, and its own admissions. That Israel had actually said its forces would be taking medical teams and Arab speakers to Shifa hospital. That the "journalists” killed in the “Press” van airstrike were members of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist cell. That the headteacher of Deir Yassin Secondary School was, according to Hamas, the head of their operation in Lebanon.

This is how you get patently meretricious accusations of genocide magnified by once credible scholars and institutions. How you boost an intractable but contained conflict to the top of Western political agendas, surging past ongoing wars markedly less contained and more bloody. How you get Labour ministers to upend its foreign policy in a way more likely to harm than to help Britain’s interests.

Tell a good enough story and weak, frightened, civilisationally complacent institutions like the British government will lap it up without question.

The Palestinians tried rocks, knives, guns, and suicide vests. They tried documenting very real Israeli infringements of their human rights. But the most effective campaign of all has been the farrago of lies, half-truths, distortions, and insinuations of the narrative intifada. Stories can be deadlier than weapons, both in Israel and closer to home.