Melanie Phillips: The Jewish community's fifth column
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.Azerbaijan: Augmenting the Abraham Accords
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.
Two recent media reports underscored the emerging international stature of the Caucasian republic of Azerbaijan and its ties to Israel.Daughter is born to Chabad rabbi Zvi Kogan, 5 months after his murder in UAE
The first relates to the growing involvement of Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) in Israel’s energy sector, entailing SOCAR’s first drilling operations outside of Azerbaijan.
The second related to a visit by President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff in Azerbaijan. This took place after endorsement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a group of prominent rabbis. The rabbis, including the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, urged including Azerbaijan in the Abraham Accords framework and for the bolstering of a trilateral alliance between Washington, Jerusalem and Baku.
Some months ago, the value of such an axis was raised in a previous column of mine, and recognition of its merits, then enumerated, appears to be growing.
Arguably, one of the most fundamental traits of international relations is its inherent uncertainty. Indeed, it is a field where today’s truth is often stranger than yesterday’s fiction.
To illustrate the point, consider anyone in the early 1980s suggesting that:
Within less than a decade and a half, the mighty USSR would disintegrate;
The Warsaw Pact, once a formidable alliance confronting NATO, would crumble, with some of its members even joining the ranks erstwhile foes as part of NATO;
Then-impoverished nations, such as China and India, would become industrial and commercial powerhouses, with the former beginning to challenge America’s global economic hegemony;
There would be a massive shift of industry and commerce to Asia from the West.
Undoubtedly, any such far-sighted prophet would have been dismissed as totally out of touch with reality, if not as borderline deranged.
But that is precisely what transpired, with the world today far closer to the predictions of some outcast eccentric than that of the adherents of the then-prevailing conventional wisdom.
A daughter has been born in recent days to Rabbi Zvi Kogan, an Israeli-Moldovan Chabad emissary who was murdered in November in the United Arab Emirates.
Rivky Kogan gave birth to a baby girl five months after Kogan, who was working to expand Jewish life in Abu Dhabi, was murdered by three Uzbek terrorists, according to the COLlive website, which reports on the Chabad community.
Kogan’s body was found in late November in the Emirati city of Al Ain after he had been reported missing several days earlier.
Friends and colleagues of the 28-year-old rabbi spoke fondly of him as a selfless leader who lived to help others.
Last month, the three murder suspects were sentenced to death in an Abu Dhabi court.
