United Kingdom

There are about 260,000 to 280,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, and about 2.8 million Muslims--ten times as many, or more. So what? So this gives us a further insight into the anti-Semitism of Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.  Corbyn's appalling conduct is analyzed here in Foreign Policy and here in The New Yorker. Joan Ryan, a Labor Party Member of Parliament who chairs Labor Friends of Israel, wrote this on August 21st:  [T]he last four weeks have been dominated by stories about our leader attending ceremonies at the graves of those behind the Munich massacre, presiding over Holocaust Memorial Day meetings where Israel was compared to Nazi Germany, and casting doubt on the guilt of Hamas terrorists. Consider the past week’s revelations alone. Jeremy Corbyn was photographed next to the leader of the PFLP, a month before they claimed responsibility for the 2014 axe murder of seven rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue. He spoke at a conference in Doha in 2012 alongside Hamas terrorists and called their speeches “fascinating and electrifying”. And he enjoyed a takeaway dinner in 2010 with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, who is on Britain’s terror sanctions list. Ryan also notes that Corbyn and his team are intent on not fixing this problem: "the party has had multiple opportunities since to tackle the scourge of antisemitism. It has missed every one of them." Now why would that be? The usual answer is that Corbyn and his associates at the top of the Labor Party believe in what they are doing. That is, they truly are anti-Semites. I agree with that explanation. But there is a second explanation, and it is found in the numbers I cited. Corbyn thinks he has a winner in hatred of Jews and Israel. He thinks the anger and fear of British Jews is good for him because it may attract Muslim voters. As Ed Husain (my former colleague at CFR and now writing from London) wrote in The Daily Telegraph, “There are at least 30 seats where the ‘Muslim vote’ can help Labour win.” So Corbyn’s refusal to back away from his anti-Jewish past is both ideological and deeply cynical dirty politics.  Will it work? It certainly displays a low opinion of British Muslims, because it assumes that the best way to earn their votes is not through a positive program of any sort but is instead by suggesting that a vote for Labor is a vote against the Jews. I've been unable to find any poll data that tells us whether it is working--whether, that is, Corbyn's support from Muslim voters rises when he is criticized by British Jews or accused of anti-Semitism. Whether it works or not, it tells us a great deal about Corbyn. If you thought the anti-Semitism was bad enough, add to that a deep and unprincipled cynicism.    

A few days ago (here) I analyzed the recent UN General Assembly vote on Gaza and concluded that the UN's automatic majority against Israel is fraying. Now there is an important piece of new evidence. In his first address to the UN Human Rights Council, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said this: I will say that we share the view that a dedicated agenda item focused solely on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is disproportionate and damaging to the cause of peace and unless things change, we shall move next year to vote against all resolutions introduced under Item 7. Thus the British are now saying they will next year automatically vote against any and every resolution brought under this agenda item, regardless of its content. Britain's move is likely to open the door for others in the EU or the Commonwealth to follow suit, or at least give Israel and the United States a powerful new argument against that agenda item that singles out Israel. There are some good candidates on the Human Rights Council who ought to follow the UK--and, it should be said, Australia, which already takes this position. Among them are Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland in Europe and Japan outside it. They should be the targets of an American and Israeli campaign for some basic standard of fairness. The alternative will be the withdrawal of the United States from the Human Rights Council. Having criticized the Foreign & Commonwealth Office recently (in this blog post) it is only fair to give credit where it is due. Hat's off to Johnson and the FCO on this one. 

I’ve written many times about the British royal family’s remarkable record of refusing to make an official visit to Israel while making scores of visits to Arab capitals. That will change in a matter of days when Prince William visits Jordan, Israel, and the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”  It has long been assumed that the royals themselves were not refusing to visit, but were (as is constitutionally required in the U.K.) following the advice of Her Majesty’s Government—in this case the Foreign Office. While we do not know what led to the current change of policy that permits a royal visit, it may well be the warming relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. It simply cannot be argued these days that a royal visit to Israel will harm Britain in any way. But leave it to the Foreign Office to try to stir ill will over the visit. Here is what the Jewish Chronicle in London reports: The  Duke of Cambridge will arrive in the evening on June 25, after visiting Jordan. His first engagement, on the morning of June 26, will see him visit Yad Vashem – Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Accompanied by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the prince will receive a short tour of the museum and meet with a survivor of the Holocaust and the Kindertransport. He will also lay a wreath in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance. After that, the prince will meet Mr Netanyahu and Mr Rivlin at their respective residences....planned stops include the Mount of Olives, where the prince’s great grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried. The itinerary says this will take place as part of the prince’s trip to the “Occupied Palestinian territories.” It gets worse.  The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth reported that  When asked to comment by Yedioth Ahronoth on the decision to place the prince’s visit to the Old City of Jerusalem under the rubric of his visit to the Palestinian Authority, a British Foreign Office spokesperson said: “East Jerusalem is not Israeli territory.” As former holders of the Palestinian Mandate, the British above all others should know that the Old City of Jerusalem was never “Palestinian territory.” It was Jordanian territory until 1967, and has never been under Palestinian sovereignty for one single day. The British might have said the Prince was visiting “Jerusalem” without saying more. To call a visit to the Old City instead a visit to “Occupied Palestinian territory” is deeply and probably intentionally offensive—and plain wrong. It is in fact one thing to say that the UK does not regard East Jerusalem as settled Israeli territory and that its fate will be decided in peace negotiations, and quite another to call it “Occupied Palestinian territory.” This episode has made me agree entirely with David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that the United States should stop using the term “occupied territory” to describe any part of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Call it “disputed territory,” which it certainly is, or just say “East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Palestinians claim as part of an eventual Palestinian state.” Legally, it is hard to see how land that was once Ottoman, then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, then Jordanian, can be “Occupied Palestinian territory” anyway. The visit by Prince William has been damaged by the Foreign Office, but it is still a step forward after 70 years of refusals to make an official visit at all. One hopes that during the Prince’s visit to Israel, someone—perhaps the Chief Rabbi—will tell him what was the fate of East Jerusalem before Israel conquered it in 1967: no access at all for Jews, no protection for Jewish holy sites, vast destruction of Jewish holy and historical locations. The Prince will visit the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he might be told what occurred during the Jordanian period, as described by the Jewish Virtual Library:  All but one of the thirty five synagogues within the Old City were destroyed; those not completely devastated had been used as hen houses and stables filled with dung-heaps, garbage and carcasses. The revered Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives was in complete disarray with tens of thousands of tombstones broken into pieces to be used as building materials and large areas of the cemetery leveled to provide a short-cut to a new hotel. Hundreds of Torah scrolls and thousands of holy books had been plundered and burned to ashes. Somehow I doubt the Foreign Office will apprise the Prince of that bit of background about “Occupied Palestinian territory.”

Seventy years after Israel's founding, at long last a member of the British royal family will visit there. The summer visit of the Duke of Cambridge, HRH Prince William, has been announced. This visit is remarkable for only one reason: that there has been no such visit before. Prince Charles attended the funerals of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, and Prince Philip made an equally brief visit one time to see his mother's grave site. Neither was an "official visit," because such a horrible event was simply not acceptable to the Foreign Office. The change is important. As the great historian Andrew Roberts wrote,  Royal visits have always been a central plank of Britain’s diplomacy over the centuries, and this one is a statement that Israel is no longer going to be treated like the pariah nation it so long has been by the Foreign Office. It is no therefore coincidence that although Her Majesty the Queen has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever yet been to Israel on an official visit. Why now? There are various theories. One is that Prince Charles was the wrong royal to send (see this Spectator story for one of the theories as to why) and time had to pass until someone in the next generation could do it. Another theory is that the Foreign Office simply could no longer maintain the claim that a visit would sour relations with the Arab states when those states are improving their own relations with Israel. Finally it has been argued that the Foreign Office and royal refusal (and it is not clear whether the "no" was over the years really from the bureaucrats or the royals, or both) was based on Zionist violence against British colonial administrators in the pre-1948 years of the Palestinian mandate. That obstacle would seem very odd when the Queen in 2012 was willing to shake the hand of Martin McGuinness,  who had been a very senior IRA commander leader in 1979 when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten, to whom she was close and who was Prince Philip's uncle.   Andrew Roberts is right: this visit is praiseworthy because it treats Israel as a normal nation. In that sense it is very much in line with President Trump's move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, acknowledging that it has the right every other nation has to choose its capital city, and the American effort at the United Nations system to stop the unfair and unequal treatment of Israel. Seventy years is a long time to wait for normal treatment, and of course Israel is far from achieving it even now. But these steps are symbolic of real progress.