Andy, if you want to be fair and balanced, prove it!

Dear Mr Burnham,

Your statement on Gaza asks British Jews to accept a familiar bargain: first, a solemn paragraph about antisemitism; then, a policy program aimed almost entirely at Israel.

You begin with Gaza’s suffering, and no serious person should dismiss Palestinian suffering. Civilians in Gaza have endured devastation, displacement and grief like in any other war and conflict. Children have died. Aid has been insufficient. These facts are not made less true because Hamas is a terrorist organization. But fairness is not measured by how emotively one speaks about Palestinian pain. It is measured by whether one tells the whole truth.

And the whole truth begins on October 7.

Hamas murdered about 1,200 people and dragged roughly 250 hostages into Gaza. It turned homes, kibbutzim, a music festival and bedrooms into killing fields. It did so not as an accident of war, but as an act of ideology. You condemn that massacre, and you condemn antisemitism in Britain. Good. Those words are necessary. But in your statement they function as moral punctuation, not policy.

Every practical demand you make is directed at Israel: further sanctions on settlers and on “those involved in the violence in Gaza”, settlement trade bans, arms restrictions, pressure on the Israeli government. Hamas is condemned, then effectively disappears. Iran is absent. Hezbollah is absent. The hostages appear only in the shadow of your rhetoric, not at the centre of your political program.

That is not balance. It is Labour’s old habit in just a new voice.

You say Labour did not “get it right” at the start of the war. You apologize. But what exactly are you apologizing for? For not calling for a ceasefire quickly enough, regardless of whether Hamas remained armed? For not recognizing a Palestinian state sooner, even while hostages were still in Gaza? For not placing more pressure on Israel before demanding the demilitarization of the people who started the war?

A ceasefire is not moral because the word sounds peaceful. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas armed, entrenched and rewarded is not peace. It is an interval before the next massacre.

You count the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state among the “important steps” you say the Government has taken. But recognition detached from demilitarization, education reform, hostage accountability and legitimate governance is not statecraft. It is gesture politics. It tells Israelis that their security is secondary to Labour’s need to regain credibility with “compatible” voters angry about Gaza.

You also claim to support arms restrictions so that “no British bombs or bullets” are used by the IDF in Gaza or the West Bank. That is not an honest description of the policy. The UK suspended only a fraction of arms export licenses to Israel, while F-35-related components were treated differently because of the multinational program. A future prime minister should not reduce a complex legal position to a slogan.

You say Israel continues to violate the ceasefire. There have indeed been deadly Israeli strikes since it came into effect. But Reuters has also reported that a US envoy said both sides had breached it. If we safely assume that this is credible enough to report, why is it absent from your account? Why speak as though Israel is the only armed actor in Gaza? Why mention dead Palestinians, but not Israeli soldiers killed since the ceasefire by terrorist organizations that have never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any borders? This is precisely the problem. Israel is treated not as a country defending its citizens after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but as the sole author of the conflict. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the wider terror infrastructure in Gaza are reduced to background noise, while every Israeli response is presented as if it emerges from nowhere. That is not moral clarity. It is selective outrage dressed up as balance.

On settlements, you may be right that settler violence is serious. It should be confronted clearly and without excuses. Many supporters of Israel, including many Jews and Zionists, oppose extremist settler violence and reckless settlement expansion. But that is not the whole story, nor the whole picture. A ban on settlement goods may satisfy a political slogan, but it does not answer the deeper question Hamas posed on October 7: can Jews live safely in their ancestral homeland — including Judea and Samaria, or what many or even probably yourself call the West Bank — without being murdered simply for existing there?

That is the question your statement avoids.

You say Netanyahu’s government is trying to make a two-state solution impossible. But that framing is far too convenient. Whatever criticisms one may have of this Israeli government, Netanyahu did not invent Palestinian rejectionism, Hamas, October 7, or the long refusal to accept the permanent legitimacy of a Jewish state in any borders. The truth is that Hamas makes two states impossible. So does the glorification of murder. So does teaching children, through maps that erase Israel and omit cities such as Tel Aviv, that the whole land is “occupied Palestine.” So does a political culture in which terrorism is excused, celebrated or rewarded. So does granting diplomatic recognition to Palestinian statehood while treating Israeli security concerns as an inconvenience rather than the central issue. Netanyahu’s central argument has always been that peace cannot be built on illusions. Israel cannot be asked to withdraw, concede and gamble with Jewish lives while its enemies openly say that any retreat is only a stage toward further war. After October 7, that argument is not extremism. It is realism.

A two-state solution cannot be built by blaming Netanyahu while ignoring the forces that massacred Israelis, hold hostages, reject Jewish sovereignty and turn Gaza into a terror fortress. Without a Palestinian leadership prepared to accept the Jewish state as final and legitimate, “peace” becomes a slogan — and recognition becomes a reward for rejectionism.

You also say courts, not politicians, should determine whether war crimes have been committed. That is right. But it is also convenient. You invoke legal caution when it restrains your language, then abandon caution when prescribing sanctions, embargoes and political pressure. The ICC has issued warrants against both Israeli and Hamas figures. If courts matter, then all alleged crimes matter. If accountability matters, then it cannot stop at Israel’s door.

The most troubling line in your statement is the one that sounds most reasonable: that there is “no contradiction” between zero tolerance for antisemitism and holding Netanyahu to account. In principle, of course that is true. Jews are not Netanyahu. Israel is not immune from criticism. No democratic state should be. But when Israeli leaders are held to account, it must be done without the double standards that Israeli politicians — and Jews more broadly — face almost daily. Criticism of Israel is legitimate; singling out Israel for treatment no other democratic state receives is not.

But in practice, British Jews have heard this formula too many times. They hear politicians condemn antisemitism after a synagogue attack, then watch those same politicians legitimize the worldview in which Zionism is treated as a uniquely dirty word, Jewish self-defense as uniquely suspect, and Israel as uniquely deserving of punishment.

After Heaton Park, British Jews did not need another performance of empathy. They needed clarity. They needed to hear that Jewish security is not a footnote to Middle East policy. They needed a leader willing to say that Hamas must disarm, that hostages cannot be bargaining chips, that antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism is still antisemitism, and that Britain will not reward terror with unilateral concessions.

Instead, you offered Labour’s familiar sequence: condemn Hamas, comfort Jews, pressure Israel.

That is why you are not different from the rest of Labour. You may be worse, because you make the same imbalance sound warmer, more fluent, more mayoral, more humane. But a double standard delivered softly is still a double standard.

If you want to be fair and balanced, prove it. Say clearly that there can be no Palestinian state built on the political survival of Hamas. Say that recognition must be tied to demilitarization and accountable governance. Say that Britain will confront antisemitism not only when Jews are attacked outside synagogues, but when the intellectual climate that excuses those attacks is cultivated in public life. Say that Israeli security is not an obstacle to peace, but a condition of it.

Until then, your statement is not a courageous break with Labour’s failures. It is their continuation. And if, by any chance — and with the help of G-d — you one day become Prime Minister, I beg you to keep in mind what I have said in this letter.

Respectfully,

Yaakov Chaliotis

A British Jew of Greek Cypriot descent who lives in London and votes in the UK.