To bland Mr. Miliband living in la-la land: Your antics aren’t bold. They’re bovine – opinion

I’m shocked. Some left-wing Zionist friends misread British Foreign Secretary Edward Miliband’s libels against Israel’s alleged “ethnic cleansing” as courageous and demonstrating “moral clarity.”

Blasting Israel from the Left these days is bovine, not bold. And Miliband’s sermonizing was sloppy, selective, biased, inflammatory, and knee-jerk.

Rabban Gamaliel anticipated this 1,800 years ago, immortalized in Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot 2:3), warning, “Distrust rulers! They never befriend anyone except in self-promotion. They seem friendly when it’s easy – but won’t stand by you when it’s hard.”

Miliband pulled a Mary Poppins, adding spoonfuls of sugar so his poison could go down and fool liberals. He blue-and-whitewashed his lies, broadcasting his Jewish identity, then playing the Holocaust card. Blowing more smoke, he condemned Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the crude antisemitism threatening British Jews. 

Apparently, even British Labourites can still reject these horrors.

But Miliband quickly started working his con, which has bamboozled millions. His 2,600-word speech omitted Hamas’s continued abuse of Gazans and ongoing attacks against Israel, treating October 7 as a one-time explosion. You’d think Hamas then stopped fighting.

Similarly, Miliband’s litany of Israel and “settler” sins never acknowledged Palestinian violence, provocations, or imperfections – beyond vaguely requesting “effective Palestinian governance.”

We learn: Hamas was “bad,” but “the Palestinians,” Jesus-like, suffer from the oppressive Jews. Israel is the only obstacle to peace and to Miliband’s Holy Grail, the “two-state solution.”

He ignored thousands of Palestinian terrorists who threatened Israelis before and after October 7, in Gaza and the territories – with 6,828 Palestinian terror incidents outside Gaza in 2024 alone.

He overlooked what Col. (ret.) Miri Eisin, senior fellow at the International Institute for Counterterrorism, calls “tens of thousands of weapons,” hidden in “almost every single house” in Judea and Samaria in order to kill Israelis – or seize land where Israelis farm.

He discounted the smuggling of “heavy-duty weapons” from Iran via Jordan, increasingly, by hard-to-track drones. He obscured the “pay-to-slay” policies of the saintly Palestinian Authority, forgetting that this supposedly moderate PA sabotaged the Oslo peace process years before Hamas blew any chance of peace by making Gaza “Hamasistan” – destroying many Israelis’ faith in the two-state solution.

Miliband’s cockeyed narrative echoed and legitimized anti-Zionists’ ongoing character assassination of Israel as fundamentally flawed, blaming Israel first, last, and always.

Escalating, Miliband accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Judea and Samaria. Ethnic cleansing echoes a Serbo-Croatian phrase Serbian militias used as they brutally expelled one million Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the early 1990s, killing over 100,000, 80% of them Muslim.

In 1993, UN experts defined the term as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” Ethnic cleansing in Rwanda involved Hutus murdering over 800,000 Tutsi in 100 days.

In Darfur, it described Arab Janjaweed forces expelling over 2.7 million non-Arab, African ethnic groups, leaving over 300,000 dead.

UK foreign secretary accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing 

By contrast, Miliband reported: “since 2023... over 4,000 Palestinians” were “evicted from their homes due to settler violence and state actions” – while 3.4 million Palestinians still live in the West Bank.

As with the “genocide” libel, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” pushes what academics delicately call “concept creep” to grotesque extremes. It’s concept free-fall, exposing the accusers as ridiculous – or malevolent. To indict Israel, the worst crimes in international law keep being drained of their meaning, with once-clear thresholds obliterated.

At what point can we fairly call out this disproportionate stampede toward injustice as unfair, hysterical, and depressingly familiar to those who recognize antisemitism, even when perfumed with human rights talk?

Diplomatic wilding against Israel risks becoming a new Olympic sport. These assaults thrill anti-Zionist haters.
They bypass all the Miliband weasel words. They simply welcome Britain, Canada, Norway, and these other countries now threatening to imprison their own citizens for selling flowers or wine imported from the “bad Jews” as allies in their jihadist crusade to destroy the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

It’s curious. No Palestinians are boycotted, not even convicted terrorists cashing their latest PA check for murdering innocents.

This latest affront – coming 49 days before the Israeli elections – is counterproductive. It emboldens the marginal Israeli minority cheering violent settlers.

Miliband’s rhetoric strengthens Netanyahu ahead of Israeli elections

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his minions feed off the world’s Bibi-bashing, undermining those of us demanding the rule of law and moral behavior among all, Israelis and Palestinians, from the river to the sea.

That’s why, while learning from Ethics of the Fathers to beware peacocking politicians, liberal Zionists should return to Zionism 101. Israel won’t be “saved” by Milibands from abroad – certainly not “as a Jew” British foreign secretaries with Trojan horse-like harangues. We determine our own fate.

To subdue violent settlers and fix other problems vexing our democratic Jewish state, we Israelis must exercise our democratic rights, lean into our Jewish values, and make Israel better. We’re no longer “court Jews.” We’re proud Jews, responsible Jews, and fighting Jews, when necessary.

We centrist liberal Zionists need reassurance. Abhorring all terrorism, desperately hoping for a new Israeli government, we nevertheless identify the anti-Western, antisemitic, jihadist coding embedded in anti-Zionism.

We want a government of change that is tough and realistic, not naive and self-deluded. We need left-wing allies who can distinguish between fellow Zionists with whom they disagree versus enemies seeking our destruction – or enabling it with seductive snake oil.

Left-wing Zionists must understand what should be an axiom in an updated “Ethics of the Zionists”: Who is wise? Anyone who appreciates genuine friends while recognizing evil enemies. And who is not so wise? Anyone who cannot see how faux friends embolden our jihadist enemies.

The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University and a senior research fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history and nine on modern Zionism, including To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, as well as his latest ebook, The Essential Guide to the U.S.-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.