Stop giving antisemitism’s enablers a seat at our table

“Antisemitism has no place in our society. Jewish communities must be able to live freely and safely, without fear of discrimination, abuse or violence.”

Guess who said it. Kemi Badenoch? The Chief Rabbi? Someone you might actually believe?

Step forward, Ed Miliband. Yes, that Ed Miliband.

A politician who needs another photograph to remind us how much he cares. Someone who saves his outrage for Israel and his reassurances for the Jews expected to live with the fallout. Apparently irony has no place in his society either.

Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary hosted the J7 Global Task Force in London. The Board of Deputies chaired the meeting, bringing together Jewish communal representatives from Britain and six other countries with the world’s largest diaspora Jewish populations.

There followed the familiar assurances: international cooperation, practical approaches, shared experience. Britain would lead efforts to combat antisemitism and in case you were concerned, there would also be another meeting.

But before any of that, a simpler question.

Why on earth was Ed Miliband being given this platform?

Holding office does not entitle a politician to our gratitude and securing access does not absolve communal leaders of their responsibility to challenge him. If a minister leaves a meeting with a reassuring headline while the community leaves with another promise to keep talking, who has benefited?

Less than three weeks earlier, Miliband was photographed shaking hands with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi at the United Nations in New York. The same Iranian regime whose threats against Jewish communities ought to be central to any serious discussion of our safety. The same Iranian regime who Ed’s boss, the Prime Minister, has now said were behind the attempted terror incident in Gloucestershire.

The public image a government chooses to create has consequences. Tehran got the photograph, its foreign minister shaking hands with Britain’s Foreign Secretary. What did British Jews get? What changed afterwards? Why should a regime that threatens us receive the respectability of that encounter while we are expected to settle for another statement of concern?

Then there is Miliband’s own rhetoric. In September, he described the suffering in Gaza as a stain on the world’s conscience, said reports provided increasing evidence of war crimes, declared the occupation unlawful and accused settler terrorists of ethnic cleansing.

Are we are supposed to compartmentalise it all? The denunciations in one box, the reassurances in another. Accept the soothing words addressed to us without questioning the political atmosphere his rhetoric helps create around us.

I refuse to do so, and so should we all.

I have written before about the moral operating system: the framework that determines which facts matter, which are discarded, who deserves sympathy and who attracts suspicion before their actions have even been examined.

Power before principle, identity before behaviour, grievance before responsibility.

Once the world has been divided into oppressor and oppressed, moral judgment becomes an exercise in protecting the classification. Israel has been assigned its role, whatever threatens that verdict must be explained away, whatever confirms it is amplified.

7 October did not create this operating system, it exposed it. While Jews were still being hunted, massacred, kidnapped, people were reaching for the historical context that would make the atrocities fit their politics. The first question should have been whether the act was evil. Instead, the answer depended on who had committed it and against whom.

That is the context in which I hear Miliband’s assurances. My argument is that this political culture has learned to accommodate concern for Jewish safety without reconsidering its assumptions about Jewish power. It can express sympathy for frightened Jews while treating the Jewish state as the embodiment of everything it despises.

The acceptable Jew is the vulnerable Jew, the Jew behind a security barrier, the Jew receiving condolences. Let that same Jew insist on Jewish sovereignty, on Israel’s survival, on the right to resist those who would murder us, and the sympathy becomes conditional. We are welcome as victims, our refusal to remain victims is where the trouble begins.

Schools and universities are where that operating system is first installed. Politics, culture, the media and public life reinforce it and once it is embedded, another statement condemning antisemitism changes nothing unless the assumptions beneath it are challenged.

Reality should shape our framework, instead, the framework decides which parts of reality we are allowed to see. Jewish fear can be acknowledged in a meeting room while the ideas that help legitimise hostility towards us retain their place in respectable politics. That is why I am sick to death of being offered reassurance by people who will not confront the moral inversion underneath it.

Ministers are responsible for the language they choose and the authority they lend it. When denunciations of Israeli policy become demands to erase Israel, where is his intervention? When people translate accusations against a government into accusations against Jewish neighbours, what does he do? When Jewish self-determination itself is branded racist, where is the urgency he so readily finds when condemning Israel?

These questions cannot be answered by reciting that antisemitism has no place in our society.

Last week, the Green Party adopted a motion equating Zionism with racism. The Chief Rabbi condemned it as poisonous antisemitism. Here was a direct test of the distinction Miliband claims to uphold, between criticism of a government and an assault on Jewish national identity. A commitment to Israel’s existence means defending the right that underpins it, including when doing so is inconvenient within your own political milieu.

Miliband’s condemnation? It came only after the motion had passed. Where was his voice when speaking out might have helped stop it? Why does the courage to confront this poison so often arrive only after the damage has been done?

It requires more than sympathy for Jews who have already been abused. It requires challenging the ideas used to justify abusing them.

Meanwhile, outside the meeting rooms, the mobilisation continues.

The Global Alliance for Palestine openly coordinated a worldwide day of action on 10 October, with a mobilisation window spanning the weekend. Its own campaign material described synchronising protests, student action and workplace activity across continents to build pressure for sanctions and an arms embargo.

“Global Intifada” claimed that demonstrations took place in more than 300 locations worldwide as part of that mobilisation, listing Washington DC, Istanbul, Oslo, Minneapolis and Toronto among them. The Hamas-linked Global Alliance for Palestine was heavily involved in the financing and organisation of these marches.

On Saturday, the Palestine Coalition marched through central London again. The Metropolitan Police forecast 10,000 participants in attendance, with 20 arrests subsequently reported. They covered a range of alleged offences, including criminal damage, support for a proscribed organisation and assaulting a police officer. Among those arrested, at a demonstration ostensibly concerned with human rights, was a woman suspected of a racially aggravated offence after she was seen making a Nazi salute.

There is no need to inflate the attendance or misdescribe the arrests. The verified facts are grotesque enough.

This is what makes yesterday’s statement so insulting. Antisemitism supposedly has no place in our society, yet Jews are endlessly instructed to accommodate its presence, distinguish, contextualise, wait for the investigation, appreciate the reassurance. To be grateful that another meeting has been arranged.

Always another obligation for us, always another indulgence for them.

Enough.

We are entitled to demand more from our government. We are entitled to demand more from those who represent us. Our children will not judge these meetings by the seniority of the attendees, the warmth of the handshake or the prominence of the photograph. They will judge them by whether they can walk out of their front door visibly Jewish and feel safe.

That is the test and everything else must answer to it.

Miliband is the exemplar, but he is far from unique. Every politician who condemns antisemitism before a Jewish audience while feeding the hostility that makes Jewish life intolerable must be rejected by our community until they deliver change.

No invitations to address us, no communal platforms, no amplification of hollow assurances, no photographs through which they purchase respectability while we bear the consequences of their conduct.

They want our acceptance? Let them produce the evidence. Let them commit to deadlines, confront the political hostility they have helped make respectable, deliver change before they expect to be welcomed into another room full of Jews and congratulated for saying we should be safe.

Our communal leaders must stop facilitating this charade. Stop rewarding politicians who speak out of both sides of their mouths, stop treating access as achievement, stop lending our community’s credibility to people whose conduct betrays the assurances they give us.

We do not owe politicians gratitude for describing the freedoms they are responsible for protecting. We do not owe our representatives applause for arranging another opportunity to hear them do it.

Our safety is not a favour. Our freedom is not a concession. Our acceptance is not theirs to collect on the way to the next photograph.

Antisemitism has no place in our society?

Then stop giving its enablers a place at our table and stop asking Jews to make room for it.