British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband in conversation with Palestinian representatives this week. (EdMiliband/X)
It’s Friday, October 2, and “We will never be silent about injustice,” Ed Miliband declared when he presented the new measures against Israel at the Labour Party conference.
When the victims are citizens of the Jewish state, Miliband suddenly becomes cautious. Faced with an attempted mass killing of passengers on a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, he offered this bland statement: “Deeply concerned about the incident that occurred on the Flydubai flight to Israel.”
After all, it was only an apparent attempt to murder 174 people—not construction of new homes near the Dead Sea.
The foreign secretary paid lip service by condemning Hamas before clarifying that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and war crimes. In practice, mentioning Hamas only made the situation worse: he equated the barbaric terrorist organization with the State of Israel that was defending itself against it.
Miliband did not remain silent when the Iranians slaughtered thousands of their own people in the streets. In fact, he spoke out loudly—but against any response. It was he who, in the British cabinet meeting on the eve of the “Epic Fury” operation, led the opposition to allowing the United States to use British military bases for attacks on the ayatollah’s regime. Just last week, he held a friendly meeting at the U.N. with the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Churchill was lucky not to have a foreign secretary who met with von Ribbentrop and prevented Roosevelt from using bases in London to prepare for D-Day.
If Miliband truly believes that he “will never be silent in the face of injustice and ethnic cleansing,” how does he continue to cultivate the Palestinian Authority, whose laws forbid the sale of land to Jews (yes, that would include Ed Miliband himself)? How does he fight for a Palestinian Authority that wishes, indeed, to establish two states: one, Palestine, without a single Jew, and the other, Israel, a state of all its citizens?
Did Miliband himself, with his immense sensitivity to human life, ever shout on the phone at the president of the Palestinian Authority over the law that allocates 7 percent of the PA’s budget to murderers of Jews, where the more you murder, the more you receive? Did he freeze aid budgets until the Palestinian education system in the West Bank stops teaching third-grade math in schools with the exercise: “Ahmed killed three Zionist pigs, Muhammad killed four. How many did they kill altogether?”
There is, indeed, an attempt at ethnic cleansing between the Jordan River and the sea, and it is by the Palestinians against the Jews. There is a direct line from the October 7 massacre to the incitement in the education system in Judea and Samaria, to the payment of murderers, to the fact that most people in the Palestinian Authority support murder.
There is a fierce debate between Israel and Britain regarding the future of Judea and Samaria. This is a legitimate political debate. There is violence by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the West Bank. This is a despicable phenomenon, although even in the West Bank it is not the worst instance of violence. Palestinian terrorist organizations try to murder Israelis every single day, yet Miliband does not bother to condemn it.
Labour has—in practice if not in rhetoric—consistently acted to preserve Hamas’s rule in Gaza even after the atrocities of October 7. It has done this by demanding time and again for the war to stop before the terrorist organization has been eliminated. Now, it is doing its best to establish a terror state five minutes away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is no wonder that no government formed in Israel after October’s elections, no matter how left-wing it may be, will be able to allow the establishment of such a state. When it slaughters Jews, Miliband will do his best to prevent Israel from fighting it.
If someone got their news on world events exclusively from the British foreign secretary’s Twitter account, they might think that the greatest evil empire in the world is Israel, followed—after a massive gap—by Russia, Iran and perhaps North Korea. The reason for this assault on the Jewish state is political: the strengthening of the Green Party with its fiercely “anti-Zionist” platform. That is why the campaign against Israel ratcheted up with the arrival of party conference season. Miliband will run every red light on his way to stopping the Greens.
If Labour were led by the successors of Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it would be busy moving toward the center and caring for the average Briton. It would be busy eradicating the antisemitism spreading throughout Britain, and would do all in its power to ensure the four independent “pro-Gaza” MPs elected in 2024 would be defeated at the next election. But the current Labour Party is the heir of Jeremy Corbyn. Its current stance should require the party to apologize for expelling him from its ranks: today, there are very many Corbyns within Labour’s ranks.
Miliband is not the first Jew to joyfully point a false and accusing finger at his own people. If he comes to Jerusalem, he should watch out for heckling against him. If he goes to Ramallah and he doesn’t have the security that goes with being Britain’s foreign secretary, as a Jew he should fear much worse.
This article was first published in the Sunday Telegraph.
Palestinians shop at the market around the destruction caused in recent war from an Israeli military operation in Jabalia, in the central Gaza Strip, February 5, 2025. (Khalil Kahlout/Flash90)
Almost a year since the fighting stopped in Gaza, and in the face of a growing pile of evidence that no such thing occurred, anti-Israel activists are desperately trying to keep the genocide accusation alive. This week, three more complications threatened its survival. The question is how much longer they can keep it up.
Between March 2 and May 19, 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, betting that they had sent enough food to prevent mass starvation. It did not account for bottlenecks and hoarding. Grain prices skyrocketed. Reports of malnutrition mounted. By July, aid agencies said more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished, the highest monthly figure on record. That month, The New York Times ran “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” on its front page. Its most effective argument was the photo on the front page: a child with a protruding spine, cradled in his mother’s arms. That the child had cerebral palsy, and that his brother, who was not skin and bones, had been quietly cropped out, the Times admitted just as quietly days later.
The tens of thousands said to be collapsing from hunger were supposedly buried in the ministry’s count of indirect deaths. This week, the Gaza Health Ministry released the full count. There were no mountains of skeletons. Obviously. Had there been, they would have made the Times’ front page instead of a cropped photograph.
In its Annual Mortality Report for 2025, the ministry lists 24,650 registered deaths. Of those, 17,286 are attributed to “war operations” and another 1,584 to accidents. That leaves 5,780 deaths from everything else: heart disease, cancer, old age. Roughly what Gaza buried in a normal prewar year.
The report lands two years after 99 physicians wrote to President Joe Biden alleging that 62,413 people had likely died of starvation and its complications between October 7, 2023, and September 30, 2024. A 2024 letter in The Lancet floated 186,000 total deaths. In 2025, the year of the famine, the ministry’s own data shows no meaningful excess of non-violent deaths.
The creative accounting doesn’t end there. Take the infant data. Malnutrition accounted for 4.1 percent of infant deaths in 2025. In 2021, it was 4.4 percent. And 2025 was the year famine was declared in Gaza City. The ministry’s report leads with the war dead and highlights an under-five mortality rate that more than doubled. Strip out the war deaths, though, and its own figure falls to 15.8 per 1,000. In 2022, it was 13.6. Over the same period, the ministry registered 50,227 births. By its own count, Gaza’s population grew by 1.2 percent in 2025, faster than the global average. If Israel is committing genocide, it is the most incompetent perpetrator in the history of mankind.
None of this means Gazans were feasting for two years. But the most repeated accusations were not “Gazans struggle with imbalanced diet” or “Food grows scarce under war conditions,” because neither carries the rhetorical power to justify any and all action against the accused while absolving the accusers of the burden of proof.
The genocide conspiracy had a second pillar. To hide its crime, Israel had to ban the international press and silence the truth-tellers on the ground. Yesterday, the IDF revealed that of the Gazans killed during the war and presented to the world as journalists or media workers, 170 were members of terrorist organizations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing. 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remaining three to smaller factions. 17 took part in the October 7 massacre. More than 40 of their deaths had drawn condemnation from the United Nations. I’m sure that now that their identities are known, the rest will receive similar condolences.
Some of the résumés are impressive. Amro Nahid Abdel Rahman Abu Odeh worked for Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. He was also, per the IDF, a team commander in the photography unit of Hamas’s military wing. The military published two photos of him: one holding a camera, one holding a Kalashnikov. Hassan Majdi Ibrahim Abu Warda filed for the Barq Gaza news agency and moonlighted, according to the IDF, as a sniper in Islamic Jihad’s Northern Gaza Brigade. Others on the list had worked with CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, ABC News, Le Monde and Australia’s ABC.
Perhaps the most important pillar of the genocide libel is its senselessness. Genocides are not waged out of reasonable security concerns, nor are they triggered by atrocities committed by the victims. They are acts of pure cruelty. That is why the genocide campaign has systematically sought to sever October 7 from the Gaza war, and from history itself.
Which makes yesterday awkward. For the first time this millennium, a full year passed without a single rocket fired into Israel from Gaza. Perhaps, then, it was a war of security after all, not of extermination.
Apply Occam’s razor. There was no mass starvation. There was no war on journalists. And when it was over, Israelis were safer than before. You can explain all of that with one simple word: war. Or you can call it genocide, and simply contort the dwindling pieces of evidence to fit that conclusion.
Using Occam’s razor assumes that logic has been the accusers’ goal. Had that been the case, we would never have gotten this far. The question is not when they will recant and beg Israel’s forgiveness, but when the evidence will become so overwhelming that the lie simply cannot be sustained. Speedily, and in our days.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach! We will be back on Sunday.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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Good stuff Amit, I love you brother.
Now get the hell off of the despicable arutz 12.
Why are you calling Judea and Shomron by this despicable name “West bank”?