A month ago I wrote in these pages that Andy Burnham had decided to throw British Jews under the bus, that Labour had run the numbers and judged us small enough to sacrifice for a larger, more electorally valuable audience.
The response to that piece, which received millions of impressions online, was fierce: I was accused of smearing a Prime Minister with a “genuine record on antisemitism” and of “dressing up ordinary criticism of an Israeli government policy as an attack on Jews”. I didn't think that criticism was fair at the time. Nothing that has happened since has made it look any fairer. What I described as a calculation has kept playing out, in real time and this week his Foreign Secretary gave the clearest demonstration of it yet.
Ed Miliband, our Foreign Secretary, posted a video recounting, in his own words, "stories" he'd been told in a meeting about Gaza: medicines "being blocked," children "dying while waiting for vital life-saving treatment," the UK needing to "act, and act more decisively." He provided no data or named source for who had told him these stories. Israel's foreign ministry replied that there are no restrictions whatsoever on medicines entering Gaza, that 22,500 tonnes of medical supplies have entered since the ceasefire began last October and that Gazans have continued leaving the Strip for treatment, 200 of them in the last fortnight alone.
The UK sits on the International Gaza Support Centre, the body that helps move that aid. Miliband didn't need strangers in a meeting to tell him what was happening. He had the figures already and he chose to believe and use the stories he was told instead.
None of this means Palestinian suffering in Gaza isn't real. It is and it matters. But it cannot be understood, let alone fixed, without saying plainly that it was Hamas who started this war on October 7, that Hamas steals aid and that Hamas embeds its fighters among the civilians whose suffering is now being repurposed for a British minister's Instagram video, and that Hamas has refused every chance since to disarm or step aside as the peace process requires. A Foreign Secretary who genuinely wanted to help the people of Gaza would be saying that too. He isn't and I don't think that's an accident.
Nor is this the first time claims like his have come apart under scrutiny. Coverage of Gaza has been full of testimony passed on by people who were never there themselves and never heard it firsthand, repeated by others as though it were fact. The BBC alone has had to correct roughly two Gaza-related stories a week for being biased, inaccurate or misleading.
Just imagine, for a moment, the reverse: a Foreign Secretary announcing a pro-Israel shift in policy because of what unnamed lobbyists told him in a private room. We all know exactly what that would be called on social media.
I can't shake the feeling that Miliband – who is Jewish – was appointed to his role in part to lend greater credibility to this policy – and to Labour's wider approach to Israel and the Jewish community.
And there is, of course, a cost to all this beyond how it emboldens the antisemites and makes British Jews feel, one this government seems entirely uninterested in totting up. It has been pointed out, correctly, that roughly one in seven prescriptions dispensed on the NHS is filled by a single Israeli manufacturer employing well over a thousand people here; that the swallowable camera used to screen thousands of NHS bowel patients came out of Israeli engineering; that the system due to protect our own tank crews from incoming rounds within the year is Israeli, bought for a rounding error in defence terms; that a drone assembled in Leicester has Israeli origins running through it; and that intelligence sharing from Israel has, by the account of people who have held the relevant ministerial brief, helped stop terror plots on British soil, including a Hezbollah bomb factory found on a residential London street a decade ago.
Israel's own foreign minister has already warned that further sanctions will be met in kind. None of that features in a moody video about "stories." A fair, simple, democratic question has been put to Miliband since he posted it: produce the evidence, or withdraw the claim. He has done neither.
Which brings me to the meeting Burnham himself held with Jewish organisations at Downing Street only days before that video went out. Communal leaders went in to ask for two specific things: that the government avoid amplifying distorted, one-sided portrayals of the conflict in the run-up to the High Holy Days, at a time when antisemitism in this country is at record levels and a year on from two men being murdered at a synagogue by a man shouting that it was payback for "our children", and that it avoid irreversible steps that would do lasting damage to British Jews' relationship with Israel. Two days later, his own Foreign Secretary did the first of those two things on camera.
I do wonder what, if anything, was actually achieved in that room, or whether it was just the Prime Minister placating our communal bodies with warm words again before his government did what it was always going to do anyway.
This government has shown us, repeatedly and now on camera, that it doesn't want to listen and isn't going to. No amount of further meetings is going to change that, because the problem was never that ministers didn't understand our concerns. It's that they've decided those concerns matter less than the votes on the other side of this argument.
We need to stop pretending otherwise, and stop thanking this government for things it should be doing regardless of what happens in these meetings. Extra security around synagogues and communal buildings over the High Holy Days is not a gift from Downing Street. It is the basic job of any government protecting its own citizens, one this community has needed for years, not a courtesy to be grateful for while the same government undermines us in every other way that matters.
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