Jake Wallis Simons
@JakeWSimons · Jewish & Israel-focused media — US/UK
Jake Wallis Simons is an author and the former editor of The Jewish Chronicle.
In May 2014, Ed Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary who pushed through sanctions against Israel this week, faced his defining moment as leader of the Labour party. It came in the form of a sandwich, which he was photographed trying to outside a café in south London while campaigning for the local and European elections. Britain is a nation with a sense of humour, and these pictures – one of the country’s top politicians gurning and grimacing as he chowed down – had us rolling in the aisles with laughter. Miliband didn’t lose the battle with the snack so much as losing the plot… and the thumping next election. What that wonderful picture suggested was that a man who wanted to run the country could not even handle his lunch. Part of the humour lay in the fact that the photograph summed him up so well. Unlike his suave older brother David, Ed, who is now Britain’s most senior Jewish politician, has always been a little weird. There’s a reason why he has been widely compared to the animated character from Wallace and Gromit. For anybody sizing him up, the sandwich moment tells you all you need to know about the man who just blew up Britain’s relationship with Israel, along with what remained of its credibility. Because the snack was stuffed with bacon. This shines rather a different light on the speech Miliband made to parliament while presenting his policy of hostility to the Jewish state. “I would like to make a statement on Israel and Palestine. I do so as a proud British Jew,” he said. “I am proud of my Jewishness… there is absolutely no contradiction between this and my support for the State of Palestine.” Really? The bacon guy?... New post. Link in first reply
I wrote about the divide in the British Jewish community over Israel, in the light of Ed Miliband's sanctions and the Chief Rabbi's condemnation of them.
🚨 New episode dropped! Is this the slow end of Nigel Farage? Is Rupert Lowe in his head over Dover? And why did Miliband *really* sanction Israel? @DPJHodges reveals all. Link in first reply https://t.co/9pohwlcwhm
But the IHRA definition also says that singling Israel out for criticism and holding it to standards not applied to other countries is antisemitic...
In his first major foreign policy move as Prime Minister, @andyburnham – along with his hapless sidekick, Foreign Secretary @Ed_Miliband – has managed to trigger a major international incident that threatens to leave Britain poorer, less secure and weaker overseas. Yesterday, Miliband got to his feet in Parliament to announce swingeing sanctions against Israeli settlements, measures that many fear will effectively become a full boycott of Israel. At a stroke, he managed to cast into doubt our bilateral relationship with the region’s only democracy – which brings thousands of jobs and billions of pounds into our economy, not to mention collaborations on security, military hardware and tech – and infuriate the White House, which is preparing to retaliate, probably with a trade war. Yesterday, Israel’s immediate response was to close our consulate in Jerusalem and exclude Britain from the group of countries trying to rebuild Gaza. We may also see growing support for Argentina’s erroneous claim on the Falkland Islands from erstwhile allies, provoked by our needless act of hostility. We will end up poorer, not only because of losing Israeli business but also wealth from America. Thirty-eight US states have adopted laws or policies that penalise anyone boycotting Israel; that’s before we even consider the spectre of Donald Trump’s famous tariffs. For what? Jewish residents of the West Bank number about 530,000, of whom a few hundred are extremists; of these, under 100 are thought to be hardcore violent thugs. They are, of course, reprehensible. But on the whole, Israel is by far the freest society in the region, for Muslims as well as Jews and Christians. Where else would you find Pride month being celebrated in the Middle East? Or Muslim women participating freely in society? Or Christians living their lives in safety and happiness? Answer: Nowhere. By comparison, that fragile democracy is surrounded by authoritarian, corrupt and failing states as far as the eye can see. Many of them harbour tens of thousands of jihadists, whose bloodlust for infidels draws little distinction between an Israeli or a Briton. Israel may indeed have made mistakes in fighting this defensive war that was thrust upon it on October 7, 2023. Many civilians have died as the Israel Defence Forces have desperately tried to destroy Hamas terrorists hiding behind the population. And the government in Jerusalem certainly contains several far-Right ideologues, the sorry result of Israel’s proportional representation system. But these are the struggles of a friend and ally, not the hallmarks of an enemy. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, or the rabble-rousing administration in Ramallah – which still pays incentives to convicted terrorists – or the despotic regimes elsewhere in the region hardly have our best interests at heart. When did Palestinian intelligence services last save British lives? When did Palestinian trade boost our economy, or Palestinian tech strengthen our Armed Forces or NHS?... My @DailyMail column today. Continue reading: https://t.co/GbP3iUNegn
The fact that this wasn’t done years ago tells you everything you need to know about Israel’s open society
Here’s the part nobody says out loud: Labour and the Israeli far-Right have become each other’s best campaign asset. Britain’s sanctions were supposedly triggered by Jerusalem’s plans to build on E1. Why now? Because an Israeli election is coming shortly and there are far-Right votes in it. And why did Andy Burnham fast-track his response? Because Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras is up for grabs, the Greens are circling, and a working majority of 166 is no comfort at all if a seat like that falls. So each government attacks the other, and each is rewarded for it. British outrage hands votes to Itamar Ben-Gvir. Israeli outrage — with a blast of contempt from Donald Trump thrown in — hands wavering progressives back to Labour. Both sides get to look brave to their supporters. Granted, E1 is provocative, and Britain is entitled to say so. But these sanctions were never really about E1, any more than E1 was really about housing. Meanwhile British Jews, who get a vote in neither campaign, wearily pick up the bill in the only currency that counts: their security. Both campaigns are going rather well. Ask British Jews how it’s going for them, and they will tell you they are at ever greater risk from this government. I discussed all this with the indefatigable @JuliaHB1.
I understand that the UK government believes – note the religious language – in the two-state solution, but the problem is that the Palestinians do not, and have not for a long time. During the talks at Camp David mediated by Bill Clinton in 2000, they were offered 92 per cent of the West Bank, with Israeli land to make up the difference, plus Gaza and a capital in East Jerusalem; roughly the same offer was tabled by Ehud Olmert in 2008. Both were turned down. “I tell people what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it,” Clinton recently lamented. “You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open and all the possibilities weren’t still there”. It's time to face facts. The Palestinian leadership has never truly wanted a state alongside Israel, only a state instead of it. But why worry about facts when there are radical backbenchers and wavering Green voters to appease, amirite?
Shamefully, the government is expected to fast-track sanctions against Israel today. Yesterday, it set the date for the by-election in Holborn and St Pancras – triggered by the departure of Keir Starmer – where Labour is haemorrhaging votes to the Greens. Depressingly, if you want to understand British foreign policy in September 2026, those two facts explain it pretty effectively. The timing gives the game away. The measures have been hurried out ahead of the Jewish holidays, which begin on Friday, and ahead of Labour conference at the end of the month. One Labour MP has already told the Telegraph that the Prime Minister was pushed into this by “muppet” colleagues panicking about Gaza email campaigns and their own seats, which are under threat from the Greens. This is not statecraft. It is a leadership buying quiet from its own backbenches at a vast national price. Here are seven reasons why the sanctions are a terrible idea that will only harm British interests and Palestinian workers, while making little difference to Israel’s security and booming economy. New post. Link in first reply.
The results are in. Whether an atrocity troubles the Western conscience has almost nothing to do with what actually happened. Not the body count; not the weapon; not the identities of the victims. It turns on one variable and one only: the accused, and whether or not they can be connected to the Middle East’s only democracy. Yet another piece of evidence was published this week, and the silence was so loud that you’d be forgiven for missing it. (After all, Ed Miliband has been far too busy drawing our attention to the handful of “settlers” doing bad things on the West Bank.) A dossier handed to the New York Times by a Middle Eastern intelligence agency — nearly 150 documents, images and voice notes, apparently lifted from the phones of senior officers — describes how the Sudanese Armed Forces spent the second half of 2024 building chemical weapons. A brigadier general named Tariq Hussain designed a munition pairing an explosive warhead with some fifteen kilos of chlorine: shrapnel for those standing close, gas for anyone who survived that, and a blast hot enough to burn off the evidence afterwards. New post. Link in first reply:
On Monday afternoon, Erin Piacenti, 32, a junior executive at Bank of America, was strolling home through Times Square in Manhattan on her first day back at the office after maternity leave. Erin and her husband, Frank, had just celebrated their second wedding anniversary by buying their first home in the leafy commuter town of Chester, New Jersey. Their daughter, Madison, is five months old. As she approached West 42nd Street, Erin was approached by Pamela Cisneros, 49, an Ecuadorian American with mental health afflictions. Brandishing two kitchen knives, Cisneros, who had just knifed another pedestrian, stabbed Erin in the abdomen. A short time later, the young mother died in hospital. If the murder raised disturbing questions about psychiatric provision in New York, the reaction to it spoke volumes about the moral degradation of the American Left. Almost immediately, in some parts of social media, the killing was all about Israel. What? That’s right. Apparently, Erin’s employer Bank of America had recently issued a “buy” recommendation for Israeli banks (which is understandable given that the Jewish state’s economy is booming). Gaza activists had thus been trying to boycott the firm. So that explains the killing of a woman with a small baby at home, right? It makes sense to them, I guess... My @Telegraph column. Read in full: https://t.co/XDhkRcerkU
Hamas gunmen casually patrolling in Gaza and firing into the air just for shits and giggles. Nobody turns a hair. How tragic to live like this. Free Palestine from Hamas. https://t.co/XzqzvQDZ92
Here's a simple, democratic challenge to @Ed_Miliband: produce the evidence to support your lurid Gaza video, or withdraw the claims. The Foreign Secretary recorded a video in which he recounted what he himself called “stories” he had been told, among them the claim that medicine was being kept out of the Strip, with children “dying” as a consequence. He offered nothing to support it. No agency data, no named source, no figures on what crossed which crossing and when. Israel’s foreign ministry replied that there are no restrictions whatsoever on medicines entering Gaza, and suggested he might take an interest in facts rather than “stories”. Assertions of this sort, made by a private citizen, are gossip. Made by a foreign secretary, with the machinery of the British state standing behind him, they become propaganda at best and, if they cannot be stood up, untruths at worst. Britain has diplomats, defence attachés, an aid department and one of the finest intelligence services in the world. If the claim is true, the evidence must exist. Let us see it. Because there is a bill attached to all this, and Mr Miliband is not the one who pays it. Consider what he is so busy “resetting”. Around one in seven prescriptions dispensed in this country is filled by a single Israeli manufacturer, which employs more than 1,500 people here. The swallowable camera capsule that the NHS has been giving to thousands of bowel patients was devised by an Israeli engineer who took the imaging optics out of a guided missile and turned them on the human gut. When Challenger 3 enters service next year, our tank crews will sit behind an Israeli system that shoots incoming anti-tank rounds out of the air, bought for £20 million, which in defence procurement is a rounding error. The Watchkeeper drone was assembled in Leicester. Trade between the two countries runs to £5.9 billion a year, and we sell them considerably more than we buy. Then there is the part nobody puts in a video. In 2015, acting on a tip-off from Israeli intelligence, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police searched four properties in north-west London and removed three tonnes of ammonium nitrate concealed inside ice packs. A Hezbollah bomb factory, on a residential street, in this city. That is one instance we happen to know about. The others, by their nature, we do not. None of which obliges anybody to admire the Israeli government, and a British foreign secretary is perfectly entitled to criticise an ally in public. That is his job, and sometimes it is his duty. But he is not entitled to do it on the strength of “stories”. That is what democracies are about. Scrutiny. I repeat: Produce the evidence, Mr Miliband, or withdraw the claims. Full interview in first reply.
I hereby challenge @Ed_Miliband to produce specific, verifiable evidence to back up these Israelophobic claims. If he can’t, he must admit that he has articulated lies and propaganda and withdraw the video. https://t.co/5s6m19c5jw
In a single year, MI5 tracked more than 20 potentially lethal plots directed from Iran against people living in this country. The figure is not mine but Ken McCallum’s, the director general, delivered in his most recent annual threat update. Twenty, in one year, aimed at dissidents, at journalists, at Jews. This week, Andy Burnham proposes to pick a fight with the intelligence service that, by common consent, knows more about Iranian networks than any other in the world. That, of course, is Mossad. And nobody in Downing Street appears to have introduced these two facts to each other. New post. Link in first reply:
🚨 New episode! Disturbed’s @davidmdraiman, a courageous Israel defender, reveals how he’s had his nose broken standing up for truth. Brilliant interview with @Mr_Andrew_Fox on @The_Brink_. Link in first reply! https://t.co/S8G1kVNLbi
Eventually, every son has to position himself either with or against his father’s convictions. There is no third way. Some quietly absorb them, a few consciously build on them, and a small, self-dramatising number spend their middle age releasing their childhood resentments by disgracing their father’s beliefs in public. @TuckerCarlson, I’d suggest, belongs to that last category. The paternal convictions he has spent the past two years disgracing happens to be the values that Dick Carlson, the celebrated journalist and Cold Warrior, held more fiercely, and defended more publicly, than any others: Zionism and hostility to Russia. New post. Link in first reply.
On Tuesday, Ed Miliband informed Parliament that he was hell-bent upon a “comprehensive reset” of Britain’s policy towards Israel, which would include as-yet unspecified acts of hostility. As ever, you’d have thought it was the Jewish state that had carried out the atrocities of October 7 against the Palestinians, rather than fighting a defensive war in response to them. What else should it have done? What would Britain do? What did we do in the past when our own homeland came under attack? But there is no need to rehearse old arguments. That awful war has been over for almost a year – not that you’d know it from the British Left – and aside from Jeremy Corbyn, it is hard to imagine a politician in the role of foreign secretary who could be more damaging to the interests of both Britain and common sense… My @Telegraph column today: https://t.co/AdByCNKCCV
Wonderful to see the mob trying to boycott my book ‘Israelophobia’, along with titles by @DouglasKMurray, @kinsellawarren and others. Confirmation that we’re on the right side of history! One message for these people: עם ישראל חי. You’ll fail just like everyone else. (And if you want to grab a copy, link in first reply!) https://t.co/1B97AYyT1O
Unmissable interview with @hahussain, who presents the Arab case for Israel. Link in first reply https://t.co/LgEsg5zO8z
I know this is no longer a trending thing to say but: FREE IRAN https://t.co/6na3WRLqcj
In the wake of the audacious, nighttime kidnap of Nicolás Maduro back in January, on Friday the president announced “the biggest oil deal in world history”, which would come “at no cost to the American Taxpayer”. The new deal, he said, would give the US majority control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven petroleum reserves, at a time when global energy supplies remain seriously depleted by Washington’s war with Iran. As Trump bragged to reporters in April: “To the victor belong the spoils.” As a reporter who has joined the queues outside badly stocked supermarkets, ridden pillion with motorcycle cops through the badlands of Caracas and been held at gunpoint by a kidnap gang in the slums – a story for another time – I am inclined to be rather sceptical of Trump’s promises of trickle-down prosperity in an unreformed basket case of a state. But Trump doesn’t really care, does he? After all, his rapacity is a dramatic counterweight to years of foreign policy timidity and Niceism from Washington... My @Telegraph column today: https://t.co/UYzrwIQfB2
I dismantle the claim that Israel persecutes Christians, which is being pushed hard at the moment. Link in first reply. https://t.co/icsk0xsfyO
Definitely book of the year. Anybody interested in the Middle East, particularly those with strong opinions on both sides, must read it, digest it, assimilate it and, if necessary, contend with it; true history is the enemy of black-and-white thinking. To catch @simonmontefiore as you've never seen him before, check out our conversation on @The_Brink_ the other day, with @Mr_Andrew_Fox. Fascinating and unmissable: https://t.co/oFRURRft1r
The real Israel. https://t.co/lhBUZcVzv9
Connected stories
- UK Announces Import Ban and Sanctions Regime Targeting Settlement Trade
- Eight Countries Back UK Settlement Sanctions and Urge Wider Action
- Miliband Says UK-Israel Security Cooperation Will Continue Despite Clash
- Israel Orders UK Consulate Closure, Ends British Gaza and PA Roles
- Otzma Yehudit Submits 20-Member Knesset Slate Led by Ben Gvir and Gotliv
- Foreign Ministry and Huckabee Reject Miliband’s Gaza Medicine Claims
- U.S.-Israel War With Iran Reaches Six-Month Mark