There is a profound difference between conducting foreign policy and exploiting foreign conflicts in pursuit of sectarian electoral advantage. Two JC revelations suggest that Labour is increasingly prepared to blur that distinction.
First, in Birmingham, where the city council is struggling with the aftermath of bankruptcy and a prolonged bin strike, we report exclusively that Labour is facing urgent questions over how much its national leadership knew before its councillors backed a motion paving the way for divestment from Israel. Chants of “free Palestine” erupted in the council chamber after the vote.
The same troubling pattern was evident in Labour’s campaigning ahead of the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. As we also exclusively report, in the days leading up to the vote, the party paid to promote some of Ed Miliband’s most inflammatory statements about Israel on Facebook, targeting nine parliamentary constituencies with disproportionately large Muslim populations. The advertisements ran from October 5 to 8, coinciding with the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacre in which some 1,200 people were murdered.
Among the statements promoted were the Foreign Secretary’s descriptions of Israel’s conduct as a “stain on the conscience of the world” and a “moral emergency”. These were not spontaneous remarks made in the heat of debate, but words deliberately chosen for his prepared speeches in the House of Commons and at Labour’s annual conference, before being repackaged as political advertising to reach particular sections of the electorate.
There is a worrisome contradiction in Labour’s conduct. The party deserves credit for withdrawing from local power-sharing arrangements with Green councillors who refused to repudiate their party’s disgraceful declaration that Zionism is racism. The question, though, is whether Labour is genuinely prepared to challenge the sectarian politics of anti-Israel grievance or merely compete to exploit it.
Rather than confronting the sectarian appeal of its Green opponents, Labour appears to be seeking to outflank them, employing policies and rhetoric that remain within the bounds of ostensibly legitimate political discourse while appealing to many of the same prejudices and emotions.
Miliband’s escalating rhetorical assault on the Jewish state and its deployment in local elections serve no discernible British foreign policy purpose. Nor do motions on Israel passed by local councils, whose responsibilities lie in providing services to their residents, not conducting international diplomacy. Both appear designed principally to appeal to particular sections of the electorate by exploiting grievances over a foreign conflict, with the risk of deepening hostility towards Israel and foreseeable consequences for Britain’s Jewish community.
Against the backdrop of the often obsessive and hyperbolic debate over the war in Gaza, Britain has already experienced an alarming rise in antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence since October 7. At the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, the terrorist who attacked Jewish worshippers on Yom Kippur last year reportedly shouted: “This is what you get for killing our children.” It was a chilling demonstration of how obsessive anger directed at Israel can be turned against Jews thousands of miles away.
The government has not been indifferent to this growing threat. It has taken important steps to combat antisemitism, among them Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s resolute defence of the proscription of Palestine Action and Lucy Powell’s commissioning of Sir David Bell’s welcome review of antisemitism in schools and colleges. Both deserve recognition as examples of a broader commitment to protecting Britain’s Jewish community.
Yet such efforts risk being undermined when Labour itself helps to inflame the very hostility it seeks to confront. Britain is a country in which citizens must be free to disagree, including about events abroad, without allowing those conflicts to poison relations between communities at home. Its political parties should be working to preserve that principle, not testing how far they can strain it in pursuit of votes. Labour cannot credibly condemn the Greens for pandering to hostility towards Zionism while making hostility towards Israel an instrument of its own electoral mobilisation.
Political leaders are entitled to criticise Israel, but that right does not absolve them of responsibility for the predictable consequences of turning extravagant condemnation of the Jewish state into a domestic political strategy. The safety of British Jews, and the cohesion of British society, should not be collateral damage in an electoral contest.
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