Only days after announcing a new centre to counter state-sponsored disinformation, the foreign secretary produced a speech that could itself have benefited from greater care with facts, context and language.
At Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, Ed Miliband spoke of “ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank”, of “evidence of war crimes in Gaza” and of suffering inflicted by Israel that was “a stain on the conscience of the world”.
This was only the latest example of the increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric directed at the Jewish state. Barely a day seems to pass without another ministerial video, comment or speech about Israel’s alleged transgressions. The intensity of this focus, among all the challenges confronting British foreign policy, is increasingly difficult to reconcile with either proportion or events on the ground.
The government is, of course, entitled to criticise Israel. And while its sanctions on settlements seem to many observers to be misguided, they can at least theoretically be defended as an attempt to advance a foreign-policy objective. The same cannot be said of the relentless escalation in anti-Israel rhetoric, whose purpose is plainly domestic: to satisfy and excite voters at home, not to advance British interests abroad.
Labour cannot be oblivious to the potentially dangerous passions it is stoking. Britain’s Jewish community has endured an extraordinary surge in antisemitism since October 7.
Political leaders have a responsibility not to inflame an atmosphere already charged with hostility.
It was therefore not enough for Miliband simply to insert into his speech the assurance that Labour would always oppose antisemitism, before turning immediately to a denunciation of Israel that garnered loud applause.
His assurance that Britain would “always recognise the threats Israel faces and stand emphatically against those who seek its destruction” was welcome.
But given the government’s record, the promise sounded hollow. The conspicuous silence that greeted the line at conference only underlined the point.
Days earlier, Miliband politely shook hands with Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi – an emissary of the regime dedicated to Israel’s destruction. The official account hardly suggests anything resembling standing “emphatically” against Israel’s mortal enemies. The Foreign Office said Miliband spoke to his counterpart about "the UK's unwavering resolve to combat threats from Iranian-linked groups on UK soil, including attacks on the British Jewish community".
It is a curious moral register in which an allied democracy can be subjected to language of exceptional condemnation while a hostile authoritarian state that mass murders its own population is treated in the more restrained vocabulary of conventional diplomacy.
Miliband’s speech reached a crescendo with these lines: “I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right.”
Right about what, precisely? And whom was the foreign secretary addressing?
Many decent people have watched Palestinian suffering with genuine compassion.
But Britain has also witnessed demonstrations that began while the Hamas massacres of October 7 were still unfolding; chants to “globalise the intifada”; calls for Palestine “from the river to the sea”; and marches that insisted on passing close to synagogues on days when Jews came to pray.
Those who ostracised Jewish students on campuses, boycotted Jewish artists, intimidated Jewish patients and staff in the NHS and forced Jewish parents to remove their children from schools where they no longer felt safe also claimed to be “outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people”.
When Miliband told an undefined constituency of millions that “you were right”, he made no distinction between legitimate concern for the Palestinian people and the hostility towards the Jewish state evidenced by all too many activists. A foreign secretary needs to speak with enough precision that his words cannot reasonably be misunderstood.
Britain’s foreign secretary should at all times further the national interest, uphold international law uniformly and distinguish allies from enemies.
Miliband’s speech failed that basic test. Instead, he garnered ringing applause from within the conference hall – but at what price?
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