Michael Gove has criticised Ed Miliband’s decision to impose sanctions on Israel, arguing that the measures risk emboldening extremists and contributing to rising antisemitism in Britain.
Writing 25 years after an article he published on the morning of the September 11 attacks, the Conservative peer said the response to Israel reflected a wider failure by Western governments to resist terrorism and political intimidation.
Mr Gove argued that Hamas’s welcome for the sanctions showed that the policy had been accepted by an organisation he described as committed to the destruction of Israel. He said the group was responsible for the October 7 2023 attacks, which he characterised as the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
He also accused the Government of applying pressure to Israel while claiming to distinguish between sanctions on settlers in the West Bank and measures affecting Israelis elsewhere.
“What the world sees is not a finely tuned and careful tilting of the diplomatic scales,” Mr Gove wrote, but a weakening of Israel and an encouragement to extremists to widen their campaign against the West.
The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, responded to the announcement by warning that it amounted to “little more than political flag-bearing for mendacious anti-Israel rhetoric”. He said the measures would “bolster the very extremism they seek to target”.
Mr Gove said the campaign against Israel had helped drive increasingly hostile and violent antisemitism in Britain. He pointed to attacks and incidents cited in his article, including the killing of Jews at a Manchester synagogue, firebombing involving Jewish ambulances in London and assaults on Jewish citizens.
He argued that the safety of Jewish communities was an important indicator of the health of wider democratic societies. Countries where Jewish people had historically been safest, he said, were also those in which freedom and progress had been most secure.
Mr Miliband has said he does not support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, known as BDS. Mr Gove nevertheless claimed that the Government was introducing measures sought by the movement, which he said was intended to delegitimise Israel rather than promote a two-state solution.
The Government has also announced increased security spending for Jewish schools, community organisations and synagogues. Mr Gove said this acknowledged that condemning Israel internationally could result in Jews being targeted on British streets.
He criticised what he described as antisemitism on both the far Left and far Right. His claims included accusations that anti-Israel rhetoric had developed into hostility towards Jews among some activists, while online conspiracy theories had also been promoted by parts of the Right.
Mr Gove said Israel should remain open to criticism, including criticism of actions by politicians in its current government. But he argued that the country was being singled out in a way that was not applied consistently to other states, and warned that Britain’s relationship with Israel had been damaged.
He said Israel provided Britain with a defence and intelligence partnership, and claimed that weakening the relationship had also weakened the UK’s own protection against extremism.
Drawing on his earlier warnings about terrorism and the policy of appeasement in the 1930s, Mr Gove said the central question for Western democracies was whether they still possessed the resolve to resist extremist pressure.
