JfJfP exchange with the chair of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, November 2015

This is series of email exchanges that I initiated in November 2015 with the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I think it is all self-explanatory.

Although it appears with a posting date of 1st December 2015, it was not in fact posted on our website until 1st July 2016. The reason for backdating it is so that it appears more or less in the right chronological order for those browsing on our site by date.

Richard Kuper

19 Nov 2015

email to Jonathan Arkush

Dear Jonathan

I wrote a letter on behalf of Jews for Justice for Palestinians to the Guardian on 14 November last week. Unfortunately it has not been published – the Paris events have naturally knocked many other issues to one side.

But it is a criticism of a deep failure of the Board of Deputies in the Community Briefing of 12 November, so I am sending a copy of the text directly to you. Here it is

Jonathan Freedland reports (Guardian 14 Nov) that three-quarters of British Jews in a new survey “regard expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a ‘major obstacle to peace’.” You would expect this to give pause to the Board of Deputies of British Jews in its gung-ho support for Israel-right-or-wrong.

Not at all. In its response to the new EU guidelines on labelling products from Israeli settlements (Guardian 10 Nov) it describes the EU’s actions as “misconceived”, “harmful” and “unconstructive”.

According to the Foreign Office “The UK’s position on Israeli settlements is clear: they are illegal under international law.”* The US State Department sees nothing problematic with labelling settlement goods.¶

But the Board of Deputies will have none of this. It doesn’t recognise the occupation,‡ wishes away the illegality of the settlements, ignores any Jewish community unease about them, and treats with contempt our right to know whether goods labelled as Israeli really are Israeli.

Who does the Board think it is speaking for? Its narrow-minded,  bigoted view is clearly out of step with large swathes of Jewish opinion in Britain. It is holding international law in contempt, and denying the British government’s view of the illegality of the settlement enterprise.

It does not speak in our name.

Richard Kuper
pp. Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Notes for the letters editor:

*  https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-office-minister-condemns-israeli-settlement-announcement–3

See Edgar Vasquez, State Department spokesman, at http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/324679/us-state-department-says-eu-labeling-of-settlement-goods-is-not-a-boycott/

‡ Its statement below refers to “what the organisation [viz. the EU] regards as occupied land”

And here is the text of the Community Briefing:

12 November 2015

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Jonathan Arkush replied the same day:

Dear Richard

Thank you for sending me your letter which sought to criticise the Board.

In answer to your email I can do no better than send you the attached piece. [History Goes AWOL in Washington Post Reporting on Anti-Jewish Boycot.pdf – it can be found at < http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=9&x_article=3173 >]

You may wish to read the Yachad poll in more detail, as it contains a number of interesting conclusions, including the clear majority view of British Jews that Israel should be a Jewish state (a view expressed by no less than 90% of the respondents), that there should be a two state solution, that Israel is justified in responding with military action to rockets from Hamas, that Israel should refuse to negotiate other than with a unified Palestinian representative body and that Israel does not have a genuine partner for peace.  Would you equally cite these or are you only willing to pray in aid the matters you agree with ?  Since I am pretty confident that you’d be unwilling to endorse the Yachad poll in full, the basis of your unpublished letter to the Guardian is undermined and indeed disingenuous.  Another point of view that is being argued on social media is that the Yachad poll is flawed, in which case no reliance can be placed on any of its findings, but I am not qualified to judge that.

I have chaired four meetings of the Board since I was elected President 6 months ago.  The Board is highly diverse, including on the Israel-Palestine conflict.  It is clear from the debate at every meeting (you can watch them online) that the Board represents the consensus of British Jewish opinion.

And the point is, of course, that JFJP does not.  It is fully entitled to its views, but it speaks for itself and its membership which is far too small to be significant.  It stands outside the community, the overwhelming majority of which rejects its views.  I do not intend to follow your example of characterising those views with perjorative epithets as you have done, because it devalues the debate and sheds interesting light on the individuals who prefer abuse to open-minded discussion.  So perhaps it is not the Board that is out of step with British Jewish opinion, but groups like JFJP which choose deliberately to stand outside the community and cast barbs from the margins.

JFJP could of course join in the communal debate by applying to join the Board.  But you and I know that it will never do so.  It prefers to stand outside and pretend it speaks for British Jews, when the reality is that it speaks for hardly any.

Yours

Jonathan
President<President@bod.org.uk>

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I replied in turn on 23 November:

Dear Jonathan

I was delighted to receive your rapid response to my email and would like to reply in turn.

I find it odd that you refer to my reference to the Yachad poll as disingenuous. I wasn’t cherry-picking at all but simply referring to an issue the Board had itself raised, viz that of the labeling of settlement goods, on which the Yachad poll had something of relevance to say. I cited Yachad as evidence of the Board’s distance from mainstream British Jewish opinion on the issue it had chosen to comment on. Indeed your affirming that the Board has debated these issues and “represents the consensus of British Jewish opinion” seems to be belied by the Yachad survey on this issue.

Jews for Justice for Palestinians has never claimed to represent “the consensus of Jewish opinion”. It was founded, precisely, in acknowledgment of this opinion, and in order to shift it. Nor, as you claim, are we  “choos[ing] deliberately to stand outside the community”. I am sure you recall how we were hounded by the organised representatives of the Jewish community in our early days including by the Community Security Trust, how we were, and continue to be, vilified by the Jewish Chronicle, and how unwelcome your own Board made us when we met on a couple of occasions.

Since then we have seen a considerable “lightening up” in the Jewish community to which we believe we have made some contribution. Our aim, as ever, is not to represent its “consensus” but to change it on many issues. This includes those you list in the Yachad survey on which, as you say quite rightly, we do not in the main agree. But we do not believe we simply speak for the signatories we have (and close to two thousand, both in number and quality, I would respectfully suggest is not “far too small to be significant”).

But returning to the issue at hand, that of the labeling of settlement goods, and settlements generally We are very keen to know what the official Board position is on the settlements which, as pointed out in my email before, are regarded as illegal by the British government, the US government, the UN and every state of consequence apart from Israel. Do you endorse the British government’s position: “they are illegal under international law”?

As for applying to join the Board, it is an interesting idea. And it certainly gratifying to know that we would have your unwaveringly support should we decide to do so.

With best wishes

__________

Again Jonathan responded within a few hours:

Dear Richard

I note the acknowledgment that JJFP does not claim to represent the consensus of British Jewish opinion.  So we agree on that.  Your unpublished letter to The Guardian clearly implied the contrary and that was what I was responding to.

The Board represents a range of views on the issue of settlements.  The term ‘settlement’ is erroneous and simplistic and those who use it fail to make a distinction between, for example, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City Jerusalem; areas which were Jewish villages until 1948 such as Kfar Etzion; the Golan Heights and various parts of the West Bank.  It is plainly erroneous to describe the Jewish Quarter of the Old City as a ‘settlement’ (I assume you agree) and it must therefore follow that it is not ‘illegal’ on any basis.  This is a much too complex issue to apply such labels and therefore most members of the Board will reject them.

I neither said nor implied that an application by JJFP to join the Board would have my support, let alone‘unwavering support.  There is a constitutional procedure to do so and the decision is taken by deputies.  I would listen carefully to all the arguments before deciding which way to cast my vote.  However, we both know this is theoretical.

Yours

Jonathan

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I replied again the same day, and Jonathan did not respond to this email:

Dear Jonathan

I note that on the legal status of the settlements, you don’t agree with the British government, the US government, the UN and every state of consequence apart from Israel. And specifically, you don’t endorse the British government’s position, no ifs, no buts and no fudging, that the settlements “are illegal under international law”.

But I wonder, too, what the Board makes of the legality of the occupation? Leaving aside Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the annexation of which is not accepted by any state of consequence other than Israel itself, I note that even the Israeli High Court determined, in upholding that the withdrawal from Gaza was constitutional, that “Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Gaza area are lands seized during warfare, and are not part of Israel.” I trust the Board has no quarrel with that.

With best wishes

Richard