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

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.

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