The Jewish community's fifth column
A letter denouncing Israel as it fights a genocidal foe is an unforgivable act of treachery
A letter has been published in the Financial Times (a paper that routinely peddles boilerplate nonsense about Israel and the Arabs) written by 36 members of the Board of Deputies, the main representative body of Britain’s Jewish community. They declare that their “Jewish values” and “love for Israel” compel them to speak out against the war in Gaza. “Israel’s soul is being ripped out,” they cry.
Where to start? Their ignorance? Their malice? Their arrogance?
They say they want Israel to stop the war. If it were to do so, the inescapable outcome would be Israel’s surrender to the proxy armies of genocidal Iran, the rearming and re-empowerment of Hamas, and more October 7-style massacres which Hamas states it intends to repeat until Israel is destroyed. By demanding an end to the war, these 36 British Jews are sentencing Israelis to be slaughtered and taken hostage again and again.
The only way to bring all the hostages home, they say, is through diplomacy. Self-evidently this is ridiculous. The past 18 months of diplomacy have produced the never-ending lethal farce of America, through Hamas’s proxy Qatar, forcing Israel to “negotiate” with Hamas which has no intention of negotiating anything. Those hostages who have been returned were only released a result of the pressure on Hamas caused by Israel’s military successes.
From the start, the price demanded by Hamas for the return of all the hostages has been nothing less than Israel’s total capitulation. The 36 letter-writers would appear to have no problem with that because it’s effectively what they are demanding. To suggest Hamas would agree to the return of all the hostages for anything less would mean that Hamas and Iran actually have a negotiable agenda. Such a view represents both moral and strategic imbecility. Perhaps the 36 could enlighten us on how to negotiate a genocide.
Astonishingly, these Jews blame the agony of Israel not on Hamas or its puppeteer Iran but on the villain of their cartoonish imagination, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To do so, they tell a breathtaking untruth. They state that Israel broke the ceasefire under the pressure of Netanyahu’s domestic internal politics. This is a fantasy woven by those exhibiting Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome. The ceasefire ended on the date agreed in the deal that had brought it about, and then Hamas refused to move on to its next negotiated phase.
Parroting Hamas distortions and falsehoods about the resumption of the war in Gaza following the end of that ceasefire, the 36 signatories write:
Hundreds and hundreds more Palestinians have been killed; food, fuel and medical supplies have once again been blocked from entering Gaza; and we are back in a brutal war where the killing of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave is again possible and risks being normal.
No acknowledgment that some 70 per cent of the Gazans killed in this war have been Hamas operatives. No acknowledgment that over the course of the war Israel has allowed into Gaza copious supplies of food and other humanitarian aid, and that the current blockage of supplies (of which several weeks’ worth still remain in Gaza) has been undertaken in a last desperate attempt to force Hamas to release the hostages — about whom the 36 letter-writers shed such crocodile tears. No mention that the incident involving the 15 Red Crescent paramedics who were killed is still under investigation, that Israel has said a number of them were Hamas operatives, and that Hamas routinely uses ambulances to transport terrorists — which is a war crime.
Channelling anti-Zionist groups that work feverishly to demonise and defame Israel, the letter-writers also state:
This most extremist of Israeli governments is openly encouraging violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, strangling the Palestinian economy and building more new settlements than ever.
While there is a troubling issue with a minority of delinquent Israeli youths in these disputed territories, the 36 make no mention at all of the daily violence and murderous attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli residents of these areas — where they are entitled to live under international law. Instead — as they do as throughout this shameful letter — the signatories adopt the key weapon of delegitimisation used by the enemies of Israel’s existence: representing Israeli self-defence as aggression.
They go on:
A strong plan for the reconstruction of Gaza was approved and supported by the international community, to be managed by a Palestinian leadership, which would be a viable alternative to Hamas.
Once again, their ignorance and moral blindness are stupendous. There is no Palestinian leadership that doesn’t have Jewish blood on its hands and isn’t slavering for more. The Palestinian Authority has rejoiced over the October 7 pogrom. Its main party Fatah, led by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, has pronounced fervent support for more such attacks. The territories under the PA’s own control have been mounting daily attempts to murder Israelis, with the IDF and police desperately trying to keep a lid on it. Some of these terrorism attempts have succeeded in killing or wounding Israeli citizens.
Yet these are the Palestinian leaders who the letter-writers say should be entrusted to manage Gaza? Do they actually know anything about Israel and the war other than what they read in the vicious, post-Zionist columns of Ha’aretz?
But of course, any actual facts would get in the way of the malevolent narrative these “lovers of Israel” tell themselves. Malevolent because they utter not one word against Hamas. Not one word against the Gazan civilians who took part in the October 7 atrocities, who abused the Israelis who were dragged back into Gaza, who desecrated the bodies of those captives who had been murdered, and of whom not one showed the hostages any kindness, nor sought to protect them or return them to the Israelis.
Instead, the 36 signatories parrot the self-serving slogans of those Israeli malcontents and subversives who are unforgivably weaponising the hostages in their unceasing attempt to bring down Netanyahu, and who are doing so regardless of how this is weakening Israel in its desperate struggle against Iran.
In repeating these canards, the 36 have aligned themselves with one of the most disgusting tropes of Jew-hatred throughout the centuries — blaming the Jews for their own slaughter. They have done so, moreover, while claiming that they are standing up for Jewish values. But inverting victim and aggressor, justice and injustice, truth and lies, is not a Jewish value. Parroting defamatory and demonising falsehoods is not a Jewish value. Giving strength to those waging a genocidal war against the Jewish people is not a Jewish value. The values exhibited by the 36 letter-writers are inimical to Judaism, anti-Jew and morally bankrupt.
To issue such a public denunciation during a war for Israel’s existence is an act of treachery and betrayal. And in their supreme arrogance, the 36 are inflicting this damage from the relative safety of their homes thousands of miles away.
Even though they amount to merely one tenth of the Board’s 300 representatives, the message has gone out out through the mainstream media that those speaking for the Jewish community have denounced the war and blamed Israel’s government.
In a desperate attempt to mitigate the damage, the Board’s president, Phil Rosenberg, has written an article emphatically distancing the Board from the letter. He writes in the Jewish News:
Whether intentionally or otherwise, the impression that has now been put forward by certain national and international news outlets is that yesterday’s letter published in the Financial Times, signed by approximately ten percent of Deputies, is the position of the Board of Deputies as an organisation and therefore the position of the UK Jewish community as a whole. This is emphatically not the case, and as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, I speak for the organisation as a whole…
We yearn for the return of the remaining hostages, whose absence is more acute than ever now, during the Festival of Freedom. Yet given that Hamas just this week rejected yet another mediation put forward via Egypt, which would have required the terrorist group to disarm, I am simply unable to agree with the viewpoint aired in the FT letter which lays blame squarely on the Israeli Government. I am confident that the vast majority of Deputies and the Jewish community as a whole agree with me…
It is remarkably easy to get the media to listen to you in this country if you highlight your Jewish identity while vocally criticising Israel or its government…for a letter signed by three dozen people to make headlines in an assortment of national newspapers, while TV and radio producers fight among themselves to get signatories to appear on their shows, makes very little sense.
Oh, but alas it does. For of course the letter has been seized upon with unrestrained glee by the mainstream media and others who want to bring Israel down. Just like the way in which the Iranian regime uses the handful of fanatics of the Jewish Naturei Karta sect, or as Jeremy Corbyn used other Jews who sought the destruction of Israel, the 36 letter-writers have provided the mortal enemies of Israel in the west with the opportunity that’s been seized upon by Jew-haters throughout the centuries — to use the Jews to do the haters’ own dirty work as enemies of the Jewish people, work that can then be plausibly denied as being anti-Jew.
The usefulness of this disgusting tactic was promptly demonstrated by John McDonnell, Corbyn’s former shadow chancellor, who tweeted about the 36 letter-writers:
Every signatory should be welcomed into that courageous band of Jewish people who have stood up for peace & an end to the killing.
Got that? The letter is being used to demonise all those Jews who support Israel in its desperate struggle to survive. These 36 signatories have now provided further rocket fuel for attacks on British Jews.
In their ineffable absence of self-awareness, they appear totally unaware that they are classic examples of the “As a Jew” Jews who were mercilessly satirised by Howard Jacobson in his novel The Finkler Question.
Now it turns out that the Board members include 36 Finkler “As a Jew” Jews. They don’t represent Britain's Jewish community. They don’t even represent the Board. They are the Jewish community’s fifth column, they are a menace to both the security and good name of that beleaguered community, and it is a disgrace that they are on the Board at all.
Decent people watching this unsavoury spectacle might well wonder how on earth Jews of all people can behave like this. The tragic reality is that Jews like this who turn against their own people with pathological viciousness have existed in every generation. The most acute threat to the Jewish people comes not from the world’s multitudinous antisemites, nor even from those waging war or genocide against Israel. The gravest threat to the Jewish people comes from Jews like these.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk