I am beginning to warm to the Burnham government.
Its strong and principled response to the illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank is much to be admired – as was Ed Miliband's speech yesterday in the House of Commons in which he reminded us of his own Jewishness and his support for the existence of the state of Israel, while deprecating its disgraceful behaviour on the West Bank.
Meanwhile my own disgust at the Israelis knows no bounds, not least because any criticism of behaviour by the State of Israel is disingenuously and shamelessly painted as antisemitism.
Do they not realise that it is Israel's behaviour in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere that is making life uncomfortable for people with a Jewish background all across the world?
Meanwhile, people of Jewish heritage who speak out against Israeli's quasi-genocidal behaviour are, in a small way, heroic.
It is one of the great ironies of history, is it not? Under Adolf Hitler, the Jewish people were subjected to one of the worst atrocities – possibly the worst atrocity – in world history. And now the Israeli army is itself behaving in ways that would make a Nazi storm-trooper proud.
I find your post quite disappointing, trafficking several classic distortions: collective guilt for Jews worldwide, Holocaust inversion, selective outrage, and the claim that Israel’s critics are silenced by bad-faith accusations of antisemitism rather than by the content of their own arguments.
A few thoughts.
1. The illegality of settlements
Most of the international community treats Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel (and a minority of legal scholars) disputes that reading, pointing to the territory’s disputed status after 1967, the absence of a prior legitimate sovereign, security needs, and the fact that final borders were supposed to be negotiated under Oslo.
The discussions on settlements ignore that they have built on less than 2% of the West Bank, ignore the historic significance of the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, ignores the circumstances of how they came to occupy it in 1967, and that they’ve tried to give it away multiple times since.
One can argue the settlements are unwise or counterproductive without accepting the maximalist claim that every Jewish presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines is a war crime.
The ethnic framing language in your post “illegal Jewish settlements.” is not neutral; it treats Jews as uniquely illegitimate on land they have continuous historical connection to, while ignoring far larger population movements and occupations elsewhere that attract no equivalent moral frenzy.
2. Double standards on “disgraceful behaviour”
If the metric is civilian death, occupation, or illiberal governance, the selective intensity directed at Israel can be quite jarring.
Syria’s civil war killed hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons and barrel bombs. Iran hangs protesters, funds proxies that deliberately target civilians, and until recently was building a nuclear threshold capability while facing only episodic sanctions. China’s treatment of Uyghurs involves mass detention, forced labour and cultural erasure on an industrial scale. Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced massive civilian casualties and deportations of children. Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen caused a catastrophic famine. None of these regimes face the permanent, institutionalised scrutiny Israel receives at the UN Human Rights Council, nor the same volume of academic boycotts, campus disruptions, or “from the river to the sea” rhetoric.
A consistent humanitarian would demand equivalent pressure on all of them. You, and many others, do not. That is not principle; it is selectivity.
3. Gaza, “quasi-genocide,” and Nazi analogies
The Nazi comparison is more than hyperbolic; it is historically illiterate and morally inverted. The Holocaust was the industrialised, ideological attempt to murder an entire people defined by ancestry, with no military objective other than their extinction. Israel’s war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 massacre - deliberate slaughter, rape, and hostage-taking of civilians -followed by Hamas’s explicit strategy of embedding among civilians, diverting aid, and maximising Palestinian deaths for propaganda.
Urban warfare against an enemy that uses human shields produces high civilian casualties. That is certainly tragic and also demands scrutiny of proportionality and targeting. It is not equivalent to gas chambers or Einsatzgruppen. Independent analyses of the fighting consistently show Israel warning civilians, using precision munitions at rates higher than most Western armies in similar environments, and facing an opponent whose founding charter and public statements still call for Jewish elimination.
Calling this “quasi-genocidal” or “Nazi storm-trooper” behaviour empties the words of meaning and is a form of Holocaust relativisation that many would rightly regard as antisemitic.
4. “Criticism of Israel = antisemitism”
Legitimate criticism of any government’s policies is not antisemitism.
Conflating all Jews with the Israeli government, treating Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate, applying standards applied to no other country, or celebrating violence against Israeli civilians is. Your post does at least the first and third. It also implies that the discomfort felt by diaspora Jews is primarily Israel’s fault rather than the fault of those who harass Jews in Western cities, vandalise synagogues, or chant eliminationist slogans while claiming to be “anti-Zionist only.”
Jews who publicly dissent from Israeli policy are not uniquely heroic; they exercise the same free speech every citizen has. Treating them as especially brave while pathologising mainstream Jewish attachment to Israel’s survival is a familiar rhetorical move that puts the onus of collective Jewish behaviour on a tiny minority.
5. Ed Miliband and political theatre
A British politician of Jewish background supporting Israel’s existence while criticising settlements is unremarkable and can be argued on its merits, but Ed Miliband's politicking of the last few days was neither principled nor strong. It was second rate student politics, playing to segments of the electorate, by repeating accusations without evidence.
Suggesting that the Israeli state itself is the primary source of global antisemitism is a non-sequitur. Antisemitism long predates 1948 and has surged in periods of anti-Israel mobilisation that include open Jew-hatred.
A serious response does not require denying Palestinian suffering, the human cost of the current war, or the political difficulties of the settlements. It does require refusing the unique demonisation, the inverted history, and the refusal to apply the same standards to far worse actors.
