Is this politically-motivated Rabbi a suitable advisor to our Crown Prince?
And shouldn’t we lowly ‘commoners’ be worried?
By Stuart Littlewood | VT
The Royals are not supposed to air their political opinions and seldom do. But a YouGov poll finds that a majority of adults (47%) think it was right for Prince William to comment on the situation in Gaza, 24% didn’t.
I wonder if it would have made any difference if they’d been told that the Prince asked a certain Sir Ephraim Mirvis for guidance before making his statement. This gentleman happens to be the Chief Rabbi. And such a person is hardly expected to be non-partisan.
In fact, writing in the Sunday Telegraph only last month, Mirvis denied that Israel was committing genocide. He said: “It should be obvious that if Israel’s objectives were genocidal, it could have used its military strength to level Gaza in a matter of days.”
But the fact that Israel has taken an agonising four-and-a-half months (and counting) to do exactly that – flatten Gaza and exterminate swathes of the population – surely make the genocide ten times worse?
Mirvis claimed the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s action was an affront to victims and the survivors of genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and the Holocaust. “It is a term deployed not only to eradicate any notion that Israel has a responsibility to protect its citizens, but also to tear open the still gaping wound of the Holocaust, knowing that it will inflict more pain than any other accusation. It is a moral inversion, which undermines the memory of the worst crimes in human history.”
This… er… gentleman really ought to read and understand the legal definition of genocide, then consider what an affront it is to be a genocide denier in these supposedly more enlightened times.
So what did Prince William say?
His statement makes clear he’s another one who thinks the whole problem began on October 7 with a “terrorist” attack by Hamas, totally ignoring the mega-terrorism perpetrated against the Palestinians by Israel over the last 75 years.
He’s another one who has taken four-and-a-half months watching wholesale carnage and destruction of the cruellest kind before saying to himself, “Jeez, maybe I ought to speak up about this.”
And he’s another one who thinks it’s only the Israeli hostages that matter and never mind the thousands of Palestinian hostages already banged up in Israeli jails on October 6 and the many thousands more snatched by Israel’s military thugs since then.
The Prince said “too many have been killed” in the conflict, and “I, like so many others, want to see an end to the fighting as soon as possible”.
He went on: “There is a desperate need for increased humanitarian support to Gaza. It’s critical that aid gets in and hostages are released.
“Sometimes it is only when faced with the sheer scale of human suffering that the importance of permanent peace is brought home. Even in the darkest hour, we must not succumb to the counsel of despair. I continue to cling to the hope that a brighter future can be found and I refuse to give up on that.”
Why must human suffering be pushed to such a horrendous pitch before the importance of peace is realised? And what exactly is his “hope for a brighter future”?
Number 10 said the UK government welcomed his intervention. A spokesperson for the prime minister said the statement was “consistent with the government position … It is important that we speak [with] one voice as a nation”. But we all know how criminally pathetic the position of No 10 and the entire Government has been, and still is, to the extent of implicating the whole nation is Israel’s genocide.
The Israeli government responded by saying: “Israelis of course want to see an end to the fighting as soon as possible, and that will be possible once the 134 hostages are released, and once the Hamas terror army threatening to repeat the Oct 7 atrocities is dismantled. We appreciate the Prince of Wales’ call for Hamas to free the hostages. We also recall with gratitude his statement from Oct 11 condemning Hamas’ terror attacks and reaffirming Israel’s right of self-defense against them.”
So the Prince had earlier reaffirmed Israel’s right of self-defence? Here’s another ‘chief’ pontificating his wonky views to us ‘indians’ without first taking sensible legal advice. Or was it the Rabbi whispering in his ear? As the UN has warned, “Israel cannot claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies – from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation”. And as China reminded everyone at the ICJ, “armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism”. What is so difficult to understand?
The Prince is said to enjoy a close relationship with the Chief Rabbi and his aides have been in regular contact with Mirvis’s office. Talks included ensuring the Prince had a “clear view” on the murky subject of anti-Semitism. This is alarming news, for obvious reasons. And it turns out that Mirvis accompanied Prince William on his visit to Israel in 2018 where he was photographed at the Wailing Wall wearing a kippah (or yarmulke). He is the first British royal to have officially visited the apartheid state, ending the boycott by the royal family and in so doing helping to legitimise the regime’s many crimes against humanity.
So who is Chief Rabbi Mirvis? He came to the UK via South Africa, Israel and Ireland and succeeded Jonathan Sacks (bizarrely elevated to the Lords) as Chief Rabbi in 2013.
‘The worst of our worst’
Mirvis is reported to have accompanied Sacks on the annual Jerusalem Day March of the Flags in 2017. Bradley Burston, a correspondent with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, described it as “an annual, gender-segregated, extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city’s Palestinian Muslims.
“We knew what was coming from previous years, in which marchers have vandalized shops in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, and chanted: ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘The (Jewish) temple will be built, the (Al Aqsa) Mosque will be burned down’, shattered windows and door locks and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.”
In 2015 Burston had written: “The Flag Parade, and with it, Jerusalem Day, has come to symbolize the worst in us. Arrogance, xenophobia, brute dominance, racist hatred. A march of, by, and for, the worst of our worst.”
Prior to that Mirvis represented the Israeli government at diplomatic level in Ireland, so he is not your average, straightforward nice-guy holy man. He’s a dangerous political operator and in 2019 meddled in UK politics by suggesting in the media that Jeremy Corbyn, the great white hope of many frustrated UK voters in the upcoming elections, was unfit for high office.
From the day Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, the pro-Israel lobby were terrified by the possibility that, if he became prime minister, Britain’s supine tolerance of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and other Arab neighbours would end, and so would trade, collaboration and arms deals.
Israeli insider Miko Peled, a former Israeli soldier and the son of an Israeli general, had earlier warned that Israel was going to “pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn”, and the reason anti-Semitism was used is because they have no other argument.
According to Mirvis the overwhelming majority of British Jews were “gripped by anxiety” at the thought that Labour might win. “The way in which the leadership of the Labour Party has dealt with anti-Jewish racism is incompatible with the British values of which we are so proud – of dignity and respect for all people,” he said, as if Jews in Israel shared those values.
In a harsh attack on Corbyn’s party, he wrote: “The party leadership have never understood that their failure is not just one of procedure, which can be remedied with additional staff or new processes. It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one. It is a failure of culture…. It is a failure of leadership. A new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root in the Labour Party.”
He said that claims by the Labour Party leadership that they were doing everything they could to tackle the scourge of anti-Jewish racism was “a mendacious fiction”. He asked: “How complicit in prejudice would a leader of Her Majesty’s opposition have to be in order to be considered unfit for high office?” He then added: “Would associations with those who have openly incited hatred against Jews be enough?” So he put the boot in – right in the middle of an election campaign – a move which helped bring about the downfall of Corbyn and the Labour Party.
OK, so Corbyn wasn’t the leader he should have been. But who is, in the never-ending parade of élite political screwballs? I have sympathy with Mirvis’s concerns that the Party was too lackadaisical over its handling of anti-Semitism complaints, having looked into a couple of cases myself. They took an absurdly long time to investigate, were often based on scant or ludicrous evidence, and lacked ‘due process’. I wondered why the Party, in a situation like this, was so stupid. On the other hand has anyone ever heard Mirvis or Sacks or any of the so-called leaders of the Jewish community in the UK call out Netanyahu and this thugs for their hateful behaviour and inhuman policies, and to bring those responsible to book?
Mirvis and others of his persuasion fail to understand that the mounting dislike of pro-Israel Jews is due to the failure of people like him to condemn the Israeli regime’s decades-long brutal oppression and crimes against our Palestinian friends – Muslim and Christian.
Is it not worrying – and a monumental PR blunder – that our heir to the throne and his minders feel they must turn to such a person as Mirvis for advice on an appalling tragedy that has been waiting to happen for more than a century and for which Great Britain is largely responsible? As Lord Sydenham described it at the time, “dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.”
And Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time and very much opposed to the creation of a national home for Jews in Palestine, considered Zionism to be “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” He said he was “almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organization as illegal and against the national interest.”
Stuart Littlewood
27 February 2024