On Wednesday night the Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, did what British foreign secretaries have done continually since Labour took office in July 2024. Miliband issued a statement condemning Israel.
We need not detain ourselves for long with the specifics of Miliband’s tirade, since this latest – as with all previous ones on Israel under this Labour government – is not about the words it comprises. FYI, it attacks the launch of tenders for the E1 settlement project as “unacceptable and destructive”.
As it happens, I disagree with the settlements, although the E1 project is relatively innocuous. It is a small strip of land connecting the Israeli capital with Ma'ale Adumim, a town of 40,000 people. The idea this destroys the two state solution, as Miliband asserts, is away with the fairies. It doesn’t bisect the West Bank and it would never be part of a Palestinian state.
But Miliband’s words are not the point. There is only one reason why Miliband has made such statements, as did his predecessors Yvette Cooper and David Lammy, treating Israel not as the ally it has been to the UK for decades but as an enemy to be brought to heel. That reason can be found in the results in four constituencies in the last general election – Leicester South, Blackburn, Birmingham Perry Barr and Dewsbury and Batley – in which so-called “Gaza independent” MPs won, and the fact that Labour’s vote fell by over 14 per cent from 2019 in constituencies where the Muslim population was above 15 per cent.
To put it bluntly, Labour is scared witless about its prospects of holding on to the Muslim vote at the next election. Thirty-seven constituencies have a Muslim population of over 20 per cent, and in another 73 seats the Muslim population is between 10 and 20 per cent. No wonder Labour is scared. From day one of the Starmer government, Labour’s Middle East policy was determined by one thing: seeking to stem the tide of deserting Muslim voters. Everything it does with regard to Israel should be seen in that context.
That is why Miliband is lambasting the Israeli government over a housing project on the periphery of Jerusalem, to prepare the way for – as he put it in his statement – “a comprehensive set of measures to respond to Israeli government policies”. Have a guess what those might be…it doesn’t exactly require Nostradamus, does it? This is all about finding excuses to sanction Israel, in the hope that this will appease sectarian Muslim voters.
The housing project is merely the excuse. Any other could have done. If Benjamin Netanyahu had passed the cold virus on to a non-Israeli by sneezing then Miliband would have used that: “It is an outrageous abuse of governmental norms, of the Vienna Convention and of the prospects of peace that the Israeli prime minister has so recklessly – some would say wilfully – chosen to spread the cold virus beyond internationally accepted Israeli borders. The British government cannot and will not stand back and see this continue blah…blah…blah.”
The irony is that Labour’s plan to win back Muslim support will be as effective as its attacks on Israel: useless. Those votes are gone – finito, vamoose, scarpered. They are as over as British influence on Israel. That vanished in July 2024 when Labour restored UK funding to Unrwa, the UN agency which employed some of the October 7 terrorists, when it dropped opposition to the ICJ arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, and when it recognised a non-existent Palestinian state without making a single demand on any Palestinian leaders, effectively rewarding Hamas for its strategy of mass-murder.
Does Miliband – or the PM, Andy Burnham – think Israel even gives a damn about their using Israel to appease British Muslim voters? Have neither of them noticed that Israel hasn’t even bothered to send an ambassador here for over a year? Do they not realise that Britain needs Israel far more than the other way round?
Leave aside the trade balance (the UK exported £3.2bn worth of products to Israel, while Israel sold £2.5bn worth of goods and services to the UK). Leave aside that 1.7m people work for UK firms exporting goods to Israel. Leave aside even that one in eight of the drugs dispensed by the NHS comes from Israeli companies. Focus only on intelligence and the military.
Just last week Yossi Cohen, the former Mossad chief, revealed that an MI5 director-general had told him, “Yossi, you deserve the Oscar for what you did here. You have disrupted a huge quantity of terror activity inside the UK. Thank you very much for doing it”. The Israelis had, Cohen said, “saved many, many lives on British soil”. And British soldiers would have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan without Israeli defence equipment.
Perhaps Burnham and Miliband think the model to follow is Ireland, which has also gone out of its way to demonise and boycott Israel – to the extent that its new jet is unable to land in fog or rough weather because in 2024 Micheal Martin, the then-defence minister and now Irish PM, ordered the removal of an Israeli-made navigation system which would have required a deal with Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence firm. Maybe Burnham and Miliband will think it is a good idea to ensure that RAF can’t get its planes off the ground, because they depend on Israeli technology. And, by the way, Israel is the UK’s second largest defence supplier – and doesn’t buy British weapons. This is one way traffic.
If Miliband and Burnham were serious about peace, they would knuckle down and try to restore relationships with the Israelis and tackle some of the obstacles on the Palestinian side, such as the PA’s ongoing "pay for slay” programme, whereby the families of terrorists are rewarded financially.
But none of this about the peace they claim to want – which they go out of their way to undermine by attacking Israel. This is about seeking to save their political skins by shouting at the Israelis as colonial masters would lord it over supplicants. It would be amusing if the stakes for Israelis – and, yes Palestinians – weren’t so important.
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