Be wary of Rulers

When I think of Andy Burnham, I’m reminded of a warning in Pirkei Avot, known in English as Ethics of the Fathers: “Be wary of the ruling authorities, for they draw a person close only for their own needs. They seem like friends when it benefits them, but they do not stand by a person in his hour of need.” The text was compiled around 200 CE. Perhaps its compilers foresaw the premiership of Andy Burnham.

Prior to the announcement of a ban on goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Britain’s Prime Minister was busily engaged in a charm offensive towards the UK Jewish community. Here was a man who pledged to “stamp out antisemitism for good”. Clearly he believes the way to achieve that is to single Israel out as no other country is singled out — very similar to the way that the UN does exactly the same thing.

This should be the last item on the agenda for the UK government. I don’t know if it has escaped the PM’s attention, but Britain is embroiled in an immigration crisis that has the potential to cause serious social unrest if a solution is not found. The government has proved determined not to solve this problem. In fact, its efforts to tackle it amount to Net Zero. Only last weekend we saw two non-violent protests against immigration, one in Dover and the other in Portsmouth. Given the recent political successes of populist parties in Europe, it is clear that the most pressing issue for European voters is immigration, and that is no less true of the UK. So why has a government with so much to fix at home gone looking abroad? In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, the King advises his son Harry “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels”. Maybe someone in Whitehall is a big fan of Shakespeare. That, at least, would be one explanation for the government’s behaviour. It has, of course, not gone unnoticed that there is an election in Israel coming up, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused the UK government of “blatant interference” in Israel’s electoral process.

There are, however, other factors. This policy is at the top of the agenda for one section of UK society: a group that is becoming increasingly influential in British politics and that, because of that influence, now holds the Labour Party to ransom. If Labour cannot win its vote, the party knows full well that it will not win the next election. It’s that simple. Perhaps this also explains why the UK has continually refused to proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation that the UAE, Russia and Egypt have all managed to ban.

These are all worrying signs for British Jews, who now face a problem they cannot solve. They number fewer than 300,000, and their political capital pales into insignificance against that of much larger groups. It is not rocket science to work out which group a party must court to reach Number 10.

If the UK’s sanctions really were about human rights, as the PM would have us believe, then there must surely be consistency in the government’s application of them. For example, should sanctions be levelled at China, an authoritarian state that has imprisoned a million Uyghur Muslims, sterilised women against their will in Xinjiang and forced children into re-education camps? Has Ed Miliband ever accused the Chinese of ethnic cleansing? Indeed, the Labour Party has previously stated that “genocide is a determination for competent international courts to decide”. So what has changed now? What about Saudi Arabia, a country that shuts down political dissent with an iron fist, executed at least 356 people last year and nearly 100 in the first half of this one, and is funding barbaric conflicts in places such as Yemen? Does Bangladesh qualify for sanctions over attacks against minorities, extrajudicial killings and torture, and the suppression of free speech? Labour only seems to get animated when it involves the world’s only Jewish state.

I wonder whether the UK government has considered what happened last time. In 2014, after a sustained boycott campaign against SodaStream’s plant at Mishor Adumim, the company moved its operations inside Israel. Roughly 500 West Bank Palestinians lost their jobs — work that paid Israeli wages in an economy where unemployment is high and alternatives scarce. Admittedly, SodaStream stated that the BDS campaign had a minimal effect on its decision to move, but can the UK government be certain that its boycott will not cause similar cases? Will the government be offering any kind of reimbursement to those Palestinians who lose their livelihoods if it does happen?

The government’s actions against the settlements and its ludicrous accusations of ethnic cleansing are yet another worrying development for the UK Jewish community. Unparalleled levels of hatred are directed towards Britain’s Jews, and unfortunately, I do not believe that tomorrow will bring any better news in relation to this racism. On the contrary, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

The landscape has changed in the UK, perhaps irreversibly, and as long as the status quo remains, the outlook for British Jewry is bleak. In 2016, the former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky warned French Jews that there is no future for Jews in France, citing both hostility from the Arab population and an anti-Israel climate in which old and new antisemitism converge. That same problem is now on the UK’s doorstep.