“As a British Jew:” Ed Miliband and the Koshering of Jew-hate

Peloni:  The self-hating Jew serves the purpose of laundering Jew Hatred, and this is nothing new.  As Ben M. Freeman notes, Jew Hatred is ingrained in policy actions, and is irrelevant to the identity of those who announce such policies.  Similarly, as Gaza is maintained as Judenrein by a plan put forward by Jared Kushner despite it being ancestral Jewish land and was included in the lands to be administered as part of the Jewish homeland under international law created by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which was then later accepted as binding when the United Nations was formed.   Kushner’s Jewish identity grants him no basis to deny Jews access to these lands, but it is always a useful distraction to have a Jew announce policies belying Jew Hatred in action, and unfortunately, there are too many self-hating Jews who are willing to play such a role.

Ed Miliband’s Jewish identity cannot legitimise a British policy that singles out Jewish businesses for exclusion.

By Ben M. Freeman | Honest Reporting | September 09, 2026

Ed Miliband at COP30 in Belém (Nov 21, 2025) By Xuthoria - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178831035Ed Miliband at COP30 in Belém (Nov 21, 2025) By Xuthoria – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Key Takeaways

  • Jewish identity does not make the singling out of Jewish businesses any less discriminatory.
  • Miliband invoked his Jewishness to dismiss concerns raised by the Chief Rabbi and many British Jews.
  • History shows how Jewish voices can be used to legitimize policies and movements that harm Jews.

“I speak as a British Jew,” said Ed Miliband on Good Morning Britain this morning.

Ed Miliband is the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. He is the man who yesterday announced that Britain will ban goods produced by Jews, and only by Jews, in the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria. Arab-owned businesses will be traded with as before. Jewish-owned businesses will not. This is a British boycott whose only criterion, in practice, is that the producer is a Jew.

In the same interview, Miliband said: “I obviously don’t agree with the Chief Rabbi.” The Chief Rabbi he was referring to is Sir Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, who described the announcement as “truly a dark day for British Jews” and warned that the measures “amount to little more than political flag-bearing for mendacious anti-Israel rhetoric and those who harbor a dangerous obsession with the Jewish State.” He added that they would “further embolden those, at home and abroad, who use hatred as a weapon against Jews.” He said this on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, at a moment when British Jews are more exposed than at any point in living memory.

The Chief Rabbi speaks for a community. Miliband speaks for himself. And yet the Foreign Secretary reached for his Jewishness precisely so that he would not have to answer the community’s Chief Rabbi. It was not an argument. It was a shield.

The Shield

“I speak as a British Jew” is not information. Everyone in Britain knows Ed Miliband is Jewish; he has told us so for two decades. The phrase is a pre-emptive defence. It says: you cannot call this Jew-hate, because look who is doing it.

But Jew-hate is not defined by the identity of the person carrying it out. It is defined by what is done to Jews. A policy that singles out Jewish producers for exclusion is what it is, whoever signs it. If an Arab or French Foreign Secretary had announced a boycott of Jewish businesses and Jewish businesses alone, the country would have understood immediately what it was looking at. Miliband’s Jewishness does not change the policy. It only changes how comfortable the rest of the country feels about the policy.

That is the function. A Jew is placed at the front of the procession so that the procession can pass without objection. His Jewishness is being used to make Jew-hate kosher.

The question is why Miliband’s voice should carry more weight than the Chief Rabbi’s, or than the many thousands of British Jews who look at this policy and see themselves being singled out, once again, for special treatment. “I speak as a British Jew” turns one Jew’s dissent into permission to disregard the objections of countless others. It is not permission. And Miliband does not have the standing to grant it.

An Old Pattern

None of this is new. The Jew who lends his Jewishness to those acting against Jews is one of the oldest supporting roles in the history of antisemitism. The costume changes. The function does not.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks established the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party. Its members were Jews. Its purpose was to bring the Jewish street into line with the Party, and its record was the destruction of Jewish life from within. The Yevsektsiya closed synagogues and cheders, campaigned against Hebrew as a “reactionary” language, hounded rabbis, and hunted Zionists with a zeal that the Party’s non-Jewish organs could not have mustered on their own. Who could accuse the Soviet state of antisemitism when Jews were carrying out the work? That was the point. The Yevsektsiya was dissolved in 1930, once it had served its purpose, and within a decade many of its leading figures had been shot in Stalin’s purges. Their Jewishness bought the regime cover. It bought them nothing.

In Germany in 1921, Max Naumann founded the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, the Association of German National Jews. Naumann was a decorated officer of the First World War, a lawyer and a fierce German patriot. His association despised Zionism, despised the Ostjuden arriving from the east, and insisted that German Jews were Germans first and only. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Naumann’s group welcomed the national revival and declared its loyalty to the new state, believing that its members’ Germanness would exempt them from what was coming. It did not. The Gestapo dissolved the association in November 1935. Naumann was arrested and died in 1939, before he could see his fellow Jews, who had been so keen to distance themselves from the rest of our people, follow them to the camps. Their Jewishness could be used to legitimize Jew-hate. It would not protect them from it.

The pattern has a modern form, and it has acquired a contemporary name. Online it is called “AsAJew”: the habit of prefacing an attack on Israel, or on the Jewish mainstream, with the words “as a Jew,” so that the speaker’s identity does the work the argument cannot. Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States and Na’amod in Britain exist almost entirely to perform this function for movements that would otherwise be asked hard questions about their attitude to Jews. Bernie Sanders, when he wanted to condemn the Israeli government or block weapons to the Jewish state, made sure that the country heard he was the son of a Polish Jew whose family was murdered in the Shoah. In each case the Jewishness is offered up front, as credential and as alibi. Antizionists cherish these voices not because they are representative, since they represent a small minority of Jews, but because they are useful. A Jew who says the thing is worth a hundred non-Jews who say it. He absolves them.

What Miliband Has Done

This is the tradition Ed Miliband stepped into this morning. The Yevsektsiya’s members thought of themselves as working towards the revolution. Naumann thought of himself as a patriot doing right by his country. Neither necessarily believed that they were serving Jew-hate. Both were. The comparison is not about motive. It is about function: the use of Jewish identity to legitimise the singling out of Jews.

Someone will tell me that Miliband is merely one Jew disagreeing with another, and that Jews have always argued. That is true, and it is beside the point. The disagreement is not the problem. The use is the problem. Miliband did not say “I disagree with the Chief Rabbi and here is why.” He said “I speak as a British Jew,” and then he disagreed. He converted his identity into a licence. And he did it on national television, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, for a government that had just announced it would treat Jewish producers differently from everyone else on earth.

The Chief Rabbi is right. It is a dark day for British Jews. It is darker still that the man who brought it about reached for his own Jewishness in its defense. His Jewishness does not make the singling out of Jews acceptable. It does not make Jew-hate any less hateful. And it does not give him the right to make it kosher.

Source

 

© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025

Ben M. Freeman

Founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, Ben M. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People (2021) Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022) and The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025). Educating, inspiring and empowering, his work focuses on Jewish identity and historical and contemporary Jew-hatred. A Holocaust scholar for over fifteen years, Ben came to prominence during the Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis in the UK and quickly became one of his generation’s leading Jewish thinkers and voices against Jew-hate.

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September 10, 2026 | 10 Comments »

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10 Comments / 10 Comments

  1. humor

    Two secular Jews were walking down the street, in the old country, one day, and passed a church. There was a big sign that said “We’ll Pay You 100 kronen to Convert!”

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  2. My query: “medieval jewish apostate who inspired the inquisition”

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    “Solomon HaLevi (later known as Paul of Burgos or Pablo de Santa María) was a prominent medieval Jewish apostate whose writings and high-ranking ecclesiastical career heavily shaped the ideological climate that fueled the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.

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    * Conversion: A respected rabbi and scholar in Burgos, Spain, he converted to Christianity in 1390–1391 following the devastating anti-Jewish pogroms.
    *
    * Ascent: He rose rapidly through the Catholic Church hierarchy, eventually becoming the Bishop of Burgos.
    *
    *
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    *

    Other Notable Figures
    While Paul of Burgos provided core theological justification for policing New Christians, other apostates also catalyzed specific inquisitorial actions:
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    *
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    * Alonso de Ojeda: Though a Dominican friar rather than a Jewish apostate, it was his specific 1475 reports to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella regarding secret Jewish practices among Seville’s conversos that directly prompted the monarchs to petition Rome for the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.
    *

    Would you like to explore the specific polemical texts written by Paul of Burgos or look into how the Converso community was targeted during the 1478 establishment of the Spanish Inquisition?

  3. My query: “Russian Jewish apostate who wrote books accusing the alliance israelite francaise of being global conspiracy”

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    * The Book of the Kahal (Kniga Kagala, 1869): His most influential work argued that even though the Russian government had officially abolished the kahal (the traditional autonomous governing council of Jewish communities), it still existed as a secret, “occult” shadow government. He claimed this underground council used the Talmud to manipulate local economies, exploit Christians, and control Jewish people.
    *
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    Brafman’s fabricated “evidence” was highly regarded by Tsarist secret police and officials, directly shaping the aggressively anti-Semitic state policies of Alexander III. His framework of an interconnected, global Jewish cabal heavily influenced the later creators of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “

  4. My query: “secular jews engaged by tsar against Volozhin”

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    * Weaponizing Curriculum Reforms: The Tsarist government, advised by Maskilim, issued strict decrees requiring all yeshivas to dedicate substantial daily hours to secular subjects (like Russian language, geography, and mathematics) taught only by state-approved, college-educated teachers.
    *
    * Exploiting Internal Strife: In the early 1890s, an internal succession dispute fractured the Volozhin Yeshiva. Pro-Haskalah students and external Maskilim capitalized on this chaos.
    *
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    *

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    Faced with the choice to turn the premier citadel of Torah study into a state-supervised, secularized seminary, the Netziv famously refused to comply with the draconian edicts.
    Consequently, on January 22, 1892, the Tsarist Minister of Education officially ordered the closure of the Volozhin Yeshiva, banishing its leadership from the region. While the Tsarist government cited curriculum non-compliance as the official reason, internal archives show they actively used the Maskilim’s surveillance and reports as the pretext to crush the institution.

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    : “The irony involving Annie Nathan Meyer and Virginia Gildersleeve lies primarily in their deep ideological contradictions regarding women’s rights and racial equality, as well as their shared, problematic efforts to implement Jewish quotas at Barnard College.
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  7. This is all regrettable but not yet so bad as even the 50’s before the IDF wiped the floor with the Arabs and Israel had a niche in the World’s foremost [IT] technology.

    We now have an excuse to repeatedly question Western Foreign Minster(ie)s as to how they intend to pressure Arab states, the egregious PA and its political poison pills: Hamas, Hizbollah and ayatollah paymasters to accept a two state peace because they never have. Einat Wilf ‘s book points out there is a certain honesty in that consistent rejection. So how is a two state peace going to work if the Palestine Arabs have refused the idea / concept since 1936 Peel Report and have no intention of changing other than to fool silly Westerers doing anything for cheap petrol and UN votes?

  8. Ed Miliband is the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom. This Jew can only be called a Nestbeschmutzer, or, translated into English, a nest polluter. He has risen to become an important official in the British government while polluting the nest he was born in. While his tirades may sound good to those who elected him, I would recommend that those same people take note that he could just as easily turn on them.

    Quite aside from the fact that the British have been supporting the Arabs for over a century now, they have also turned themselves into the flag-bearer for other European countries that didn’t have the guts or the gumption to turn against Israel directly themselves.

    They will surely regret taking this position; the question is if they will need to wait for a long time until they recognize the fact. They will find that the number of Arab immigrants, buoyed up by their supporting position, will increase significantly. Israel will not be willing to take them back any more than most of the Arab countries they came from.