Why Andy Burnham started with Israel

Andy Burnham has chosen his first defining foreign policy intervention. Not Ukraine, not Russia, not China, not NATO, but Israel.

A politician who has spent the last decade focused on buses, policing, devolution and regional growth has decided that, before he has even entered Downing Street, this is the international issue on which he wants Britain to understand him.

That should tell us something, not about the Middle East, about British politics.

I don’t think Andy Burnham’s speech was really about Israel at all. I think it was about something I’ve written about before, the moral operating system. I suspect history will remember it as the moment that operating system reached the heart of British government.

To understand why, you first have to understand the political landscape Burnham inherits. Only weeks ago Labour appeared destined for defeat, while today the picture looks rather different.

Nigel Farage appears to be presiding over the slow unravelling of Reform. Whether through dreadful advisers, poor judgement and an inability to be advised or, as I increasingly suspect, because the reality of governing was never quite as attractive as the theatre of campaigning, Reform suddenly looks very vulnerable.

At the same time, Restore is beginning to erode Reform’s coalition from one direction, while the Conservatives, finally under a leader who appears capable of rebuilding credibility, seem too embittered by recent defections to contemplate any meaningful accommodation with Reform’s more pragmatic wing.

Suddenly, Labour has something it didn’t appear to possess only a few weeks ago, a path. Not an easy one, not even a likely one, but a path nonetheless.

The difficulty is that it cannot simply rely on the Right fragmenting. Keir Starmer leaves behind a fractured electoral coalition. If Burnham is to become Prime Minister in his own right, he has only two realistic options. Either govern through some arrangement with parties such as the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, or persuade the progressive voters who deserted Labour that they should come home.

Now his speech begins to make perfect political sense.

Since Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Israel has ceased to be simply another foreign policy issue on Britain’s progressive Left. It has become a political litmus test, a shorthand, a badge of identity. Support tougher sanctions, demand greater diplomatic isolation, recognise a Palestinian state immediately.

Whether those positions actually advance peace has become almost secondary. They are now signals, a way of communicating that you belong.

There is another remarkable feature of modern British politics. Over the past few years we have watched the emergence of an alliance that would once have seemed almost impossible. A progressive movement whose instincts on sexuality, secularism and gender identity often sit in profound tension with many socially conservative Muslim communities has nevertheless found common political purpose around Israel and Palestine.

On many domestic issues they disagree fundamentally, on Israel they have discovered a common language.

That coalition now matters enormously to Labour’s electoral future, and Burnham knows it. His speech wasn’t aimed at Gaza or the West Bank, it was aimed at Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Hackney and Glasgow. It was intended to reassure a very specific coalition of voters that he speaks their political language.

Whether you choose to call that coalition-building, electoral signalling or a dog whistle is almost beside the point. The intended audience is unmistakable. But that still doesn’t explain why Israel has become the language through which that coalition recognises itself, for that, we need to go deeper.

When I wrote recently about the moral operating system, I argued that the defining political divide in the West was no longer simply between Left and Right. It was between those who still begin with evidence and those who increasingly begin with ideology.

The operating system is remarkably simple. Power is guilt, weakness is virtue, history is compressed into a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Under this structure every conflict becomes a morality play, with every nation assigned a permanent role.

Once that operating system is installed, much of the thinking is done for you. It tells you who deserves sympathy before the facts emerge, who is lying before anyone has spoken, who carries moral responsibility before the first shot has been fired.

7 October did not create that operating system, it exposed it. Within hours of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, significant sections of the progressive movement had already returned to familiar language about occupation, colonialism and resistance. Before the dead had been identified, before the hostages had in some cases even reached Gaza, before the full horror was understood. The moral roles had already been assigned and subsequently reality was expected to fit the operating system, not the other way around.

That is why I argued recently that Entebbe wouldn’t be celebrated today. The essay was never really about Entebbe, but about the operating system. In 1976, the world instinctively celebrated a hostage rescue. By 2024, the rescue at Nuseirat was judged through an entirely different framework. The hostages became secondary, the defeat of Hamas became secondary. The first question was no longer, What happened? It was, Who possesses power? The operating system had changed.

Over the past few decades, it has steadily migrated. First universities, then trade unions, then cultural institutions, newsrooms and boardrooms. Now, if Burnham’s speech is any guide, it has reached the heart of British government.

That is the real significance of Burnham’s intervention. Not simply that Britain’s next Prime Minister has adopted a tougher position on Israel; politicians change foreign policy all the time, governments disagree over wars all the time. That, in itself, would barely be remarkable, but what is remarkable is something else entirely.

Burnham has chosen Israel as the issue through which to introduce the moral language of his leadership. In doing so, he is not simply recognising the operating system that has transformed parts of Britain’s activist Left, he is legitimising it. He is signalling that the framework which has already reshaped universities, trade unions, cultural institutions and newsrooms is no longer merely the language of campaigners. It is becoming the language of government itself.

That should concern anyone who believes politics should begin with evidence rather than ideology. Because once ideology determines the conclusion, facts become negotiable. Reality becomes something to interpret rather than discover. Nowhere has that been more obvious than Israel.

The problem is that what may make perfect electoral sense also carries profound social consequences.

British politics still refuses to confront something that most British Jews have understood for years. When Israel is uniquely singled out for sanctions, boycotts and exceptional treatment, it rarely remains confined to foreign policy, it changes the moral atmosphere.

When the world’s only Jewish state is held to standards applied to no other democracy, Jewish sovereignty itself becomes morally suspect. Once Israel becomes a symbol rather than a country, Jews inevitably become symbols rather than people. That dehumanisation allows not only attacks to be carried out, but also their motivation to be contextualised and excused.

That is why so many British Jews hear these debates differently from everyone else. Criticism of Israeli governments is not the issue, exceptionalism is.

Burnham’s supporters will point, quite rightly, to his long relationship with Manchester’s Jewish community. They will remind us that he has consistently condemned antisemitism, and I do not question the sincerity of any of that. But sincere friendships with Jews cannot become immunity from scrutiny if the politics being pursued legitimise an ideological framework that increasingly casts the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate.

Which brings me to the part of this story that matters most. Not Andy Burnham, but us, British Jewry. Britain’s Jewish community has spent years falling into the same trap, the mistaking of access for influence.

Politicians attend our dinners, visit our synagogues, speak movingly about antisemitism, receive standing ovations. Sometime they even invite us into No10 for a glass of kosher wine and a sing song. But then we return home, they return to Westminster and pursue policies that many British Jews believe reinforce the exceptional treatment of the world’s only Jewish state.

What do we do in response? We invite them back again, we accept their invitations, almost without exception.

Real influence requires trade-offs, because politicians only change behaviour when choices carry consequences. If there is no communal, political or reputational cost to repeatedly pursuing policies that British Jews overwhelmingly regard as applying discriminatory standards to Israel, why would any rational politician ever change course?

Andy Burnham has given the Jewish community an opportunity. Not necessarily to reject him, not necessarily to embrace him, but to draw a line. To make unmistakably clear that applying standards to the Jewish state which are applied nowhere else is not principled internationalism, it is a double standard. Double standards directed at the world’s only Jewish state do not simply influence foreign policy, they shape the climate in which antisemitism flourishes.

My prediction for British politics is that historians will not remember this as the speech in which Andy Burnham changed Britain’s policy towards Israel. They will remember it as the speech in which Britain’s next Prime Minister legitimised a moral operating system that had spent years moving through our countries institutions, but only at this point finally arrived at the centre of government.

Once governments begin making decisions through an operating system rather than through evidence, Israel will not be the last issue on which conclusions precede facts. It will simply have been the first unmistakable warning.

Andy Burnham appears to have made his choice. The question now is whether Britain’s Jewish community will continue making the same mistake it has made for so long.

If this speech tells us anything, it is that Britain’s political class has already adapted to the new operating system. The only question that remains is whether we intend to challenge it.