Yachad, the establishment’s enemy in disguise


June 27, 2017
Sarah Benton

Remove Yachad from the Board of Deputies of British Jews

Letter from Adam Cohen Londond, [sic] United Kingdom

[We haven’t done the writer the favour of correcting his spelling etc]

Dear Mr.Arkush, President of the BOD of British Jews;

Yachad has been the most damaging organization in British history against Israel. It has been the most damaging, more damaging than Students for Justice in Palestine and more damaging than the early anti-Zionist Council for Judaism [ both of these are American orgnaisations, not British]. Yachad has done more to turn young people against Israel than any organization in the UK. It has given cover to anti-Israel attitudes on campus and particularly its approach to Israel’s self defense.

We dispute Yachads false claims that 75% of Jews believe the ‘settlements are a major obstacle to peace,’ we dispute the lie of their supposedly high support figures among the Jewish community, which are in the vast minority and fringes of Jewish society. Was there peace pre 1967?. Yachad focuses only on attacking Israels security requirements.

The fact is that 80% of the British Jewish community are strong supporters of Israel *and if they knew what Yachad’s true objectives were they would have been totally shunned by now.

For many in the community, the last straw came last week after Yachad supported, against the view of the BOD, the British Government in the shameful anti-Israel resolution at the UN. A resolution so detrimental to Israel’s security, which calls the western wall ‘occupied territory,’ Yachad joined in with the likes of none other than Hamas in cheering this nasty outcome.

They say you can judge a person by the company he keeps. Yachad shamefully endorse, among others +972 blog, Yesh Din and Breaking the Silence. Their websites, amplifiers of crude Arab propaganda, reveal a thinly disguised hatred of Israel, masquerading as a noble quest in the pursuit of human rights for the Arabs, yet a cold indifference to Jewish human rights.

The admission of Yachad to the Board of Deputies is an insult not only to Israel and people who care for and love the country, it’s an insult to all those brave soldiers in the IDF, who put their lives at risk while Yachad cosy up to organisations like B’tselem to condemn the IDF in protecting its citizens.

Yachad gained membership to the BOD due to the unfortunate domination of deputies that are left wing liberals. The BOD must make this right and must ensure more integration from all communities such as the eastern Sephardic communities and others which are hardly represented on the BOD, yet would take a strong stand against Yachad.

We, the undersigned implore you to take action and call a vote to keep the Board of deputies a warm place for Israel and to remove Yachad effective immediate, using all means possible.

Thank-you.

For more in depth research into Yachad and their anti-Israel activity please see United with Israel, yachad-a-cuckoo-in-the-anglo-jewish-nest/

This petition will be delivered to:
President of the Board of deputies of British Jews
Jonathan Arkush

JfJfP postings. Note 1: 611 people have signed the petition since it was launched in January 2017

Note 2: from the spelling and the references e.g. Council for Judaism – he’s left the “American” off its name – and Students for Palestine this writer on British Jews appears to be American.


The Board of Deputies president “unequivocally condemns” Yachad

By Adam Cohen, Londond, [sic] United Kingdom
January 16, 2017

The Board of Deputies of British Jews ‘Unequivocally Condemns’ Yachad for backing the anti Israel UN resolution:

”Mr Arkush rejected calls from deputies at the meeting, to remove the group from the Board.

He said: “I am not a supporter of the views of Yachad. I voted against the membership of Yachad, when others voted for it on the basis of inclusion.

“But I am not in favour of expelling anyone. I think if someone holds an unpopular view they have the chance to have it heard here on the floor.

This does not mean we can not call for a vote to remove Yachad, therefore we must increase our efforts to make the vote happen, and call on our deputies to vote them out.

With hard work and effort, we will succeed in removing them and safeguarde Israel’s interests in the UK.

* Mr Cohen does not give a source for this claim. Almost all British Jews think ‘Israel has a right to exist’. But a majority think Israel should seek a peaceful solution to the conflict with Palestine and are critical of Israeli policies, viz Settlements, which impede that. The figure of 80% does not feature in any table.  See The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel, Department of Sociology School of Arts and Social Sciences City University London. 


The Board of Deputies president “unequivocally condemns” Yachad for backing a UN resolution against Israeli settlements

Mr Arkush said: “I fail to understand how Yachad believes that Resolution 2334 would contribute to the prospects of peace”

By Rosa Doherty, Jewish Chronicle
January 15, 2017

The Board of Deputies president said he “unequivocally condemned” Yachad for backing a UN resolution against Israeli settlements.

In a statement delivered at its monthly meeting, the Board’s president, Jonathan Arkush  [above] said: “I fail to understand how Yachad believes that Resolution 2334 would contribute to the prospects of peace, given that leading progressive voices in Israel including Itzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni roundly condemned it.”

Speaking at the meeting on Sunday he criticised Yachad for “deciding to take their views direct to Government and other public bodies,” instead of going through the Board. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution against Israeli settlements in December, where all but one member of the 15-member council voted in favour and the US abstained.

At the time Jewish groups around the world reacted with varying degrees of disappointment. Speaking about the resolution at the meeting, Mr Arkush said:

“The UN has once again chosen to demonstrate its hostility to Israel. …

“The Security Council resolution passed in December is destructive to peace because it encourages Palestinians to believe that they can maintain their refusal to come to the negotiating table.

“I note that the Security Council has been an utter failure in saving hundreds of thousands of lives in Syria.  It clearly thinks of Israel as an easier target.”

Mr Arkush said he was disappointed the UK government failed to exercise its power to “veto a biased and unbalanced resolution”.  He told members at the meeting the UN adopted “disproportionate focus on and stigmatisation of Israel”.

“In recent years the UN passed 233 resolutions critical of Israel and 8 on Syria, moving even outgoing Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon to deplore the body’s bias against Israel,” Mr Arkush said.

Amos Schonfield, deputy for Yachad, defended the decision to back the resolution and contact government, encouraging support for it. He said:

“Yachad reaching out to government is nothing new.  It is worth taking a closer look at the reading of the resolution.

“It reiterates Israel’s right to exist the right, for its citizens to live free from terror, it condemns incitement, and states the obligation of the Palestinian Authority to dismantle terror infrastructure.

“It states it will not recognise changes to the green line other than those that are agreed by parties through negotiations.”

Mr Arkush rejected calls from deputies at the meeting, to remove the group from the Board.

He said:

“Those who talk about the Board’s constitution, I do not read the constitution as requiring every deputy to have a particular view or not to have a particular view.  … I am not a support of the views of Yachad. I voted against the membership of Yachad, when others voted for it on the basis of inclusion.

“But I am not in favour of expelling anyone. I think if someone holds an unpopular view they have the chance to have it heard here on the floor.

“I am not going to expel them because I don’t agree with them.”


Yachad: A Cuckoo in the Anglo-Jewish Nest

By Jonathan Hoffman, blog, United with Israel
January 04, 2017

Yachad is the UK equivalent of J Street. It claims that it works “to build active support for a two-state solution in the British Jewish community.”

Yachad is financed by the Grabiner Trust and by donations. It is a registered charity, meaning that it doesn’t pay tax on most of its income and can claim back tax paid by its donors.

Because it is a charity and charities are limited by law in the extent of political campaigning they can undertake, the trustees of Yachad are careful on its website to portray the charity as an enabler (eg through education and trips) rather than a campaigner. However this is a smokescreen. Yachad is deeply involved in the politics of the Middle East. Even though it has set up a separate company, Yachad Ltd, to channel its ‘political’ activities through, it is hard to see how any of its activities can be classified as ‘charitable’. After all, the ‘education’ and trips that it organises are all for a political purpose – namely, to pressurise the democratically elected government of Israel into actions which it does not wish to take.

Most recently Yachad wrote to the UK’s Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, urging the UK to vote in favour of UN Security Council Resolution 2334. This Resolution is deeply biased against Israel, blaming the lack of peace almost exclusively on the expansion of settlements in Judea and Samaria, with hardly a mention of Palestinian terror and rejectionism. It states that everything beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines is “occupied Palestinian territory”, thereby denying the Jewish claim to the Old City of Jerusalem and thus to Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism. It encourages Palestinian hardliners to wrongly believe they can achieve a State through the UN – and not through direct negotiations with Israel.

It was proposed by New Zealand, Venezuela, Senegal and Malaysia. New Zealand has a Foreign Minister who describes Hamas not as a genocidal terrorist group, but as a group which has merely “stopped short of formally accepting the Quartet Principles”. Venezuela is a collapsed socialist dictatorship, notorious for neglecting human rights.  It has no diplomatic relations with Israel. The population of Senegal has the highest level of antisemitism of any country in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaysia is a Muslim nation which has no diplomatic ties with Israel and has refused to host the FIFA Congress this year because it means hosting an Israeli delegation. These are the nations with whom Yachad is shamefully allying, by supporting Resolution 2334.

Lobbying Against Israel

But this is far from the first time that Yachad (which absurdly makes the Orwellian claim to be ‘pro-Israel, pro-Peace’) has lobbied the UK government to act against the government of Israel. In January 2014 it urged its supporters to write to the Prime Minister ahead of his visit to Israel. It wanted the Prime Minister to urge his Israeli opposite number to agree to a divided Jerusalem plus withdrawal by Israel to pre-1967 borders (with agreed landswaps).

These borders are the ceasefire lines established in 1949, when Israel fought off the Arab attempt to exterminate it at its rebirth. These ceasefire lines have been called the “Auschwitz borders” (by Abba Eban, one of Israel’s most respected statesmen) because they leave Israel militarily indefensible against its enemies.

Behind Yachad’s attempt to subvert the elected government of Israel are a myriad of initiatives. In Israel Yachad arranges trips into Judea and Samaria with a group called ‘Breaking the Silence’, which does nothing but denigrate and badmouth the IDF, without ever mentioning the terrorists that threaten Israel every day. One participant on a Yachad trip described how the leader of the trip launched into ‘a litany of accusations against Israel’. He realised that Yachad’s slogan ‘Pro Israel Pro Peace “is pure propaganda, as seen in Orwell’s 1984.”

In 2012 Yachad supported the UN upgrade to Palestinian status which was opposed by Israel and every other western country. Every truly pro-Israel organisation believed that direct negotiations are the only way forward. But not Yachad.

Indeed Yachad supports the immediate creation of a Palestinian State. Imagine the threat to Israel, if Yachad had its way, and Palestine was a country, no doubt governed by Hamas, with weapons still more threatening than the missiles based in Gaza, which even now can reach Haifa.

Supporting Palestinian ‘Resistance’

Yachad has never condemned the practice of boycotting Israeli goods and makes no effort to explain how Hamas targets Israeli civilians. Yachad portrays the Security Fence only as something which harms the Palestinians. It is silent when it comes to the number of Israeli lives the Fence has saved. It is raising money for an anti-Israel charity, the Holy Land Trust, which supports a boycott of Israeli goods and the Kairos Palestine document which denies the Jewish historical connection to Israel, blames Israel solely for the continuation of the conflict and characterises terrorist acts of “armed resistance” as “Palestinian legal resistance.”

Worst of all, Yachad is poisoning young Jewish minds to abhor Israel government policies and to only see one side of the conflict. In the recent elections for the leadership of the Union of Jewish Students, one candidate stood who had been a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who supported a boycott of Israeli goods and who produced and acted in the viciously antisemitic [sic] play Seven Jewish Children, exacerbating the antisemitic abuse directed at another Jewish student at York University who had protested by leafletting outside the theatre. Incredibly his candidacy was welcomed by Laura Janner-Klausner, senior rabbi to Reform Judaism. This is the kind of thing to which Yachad’s activities are giving free rein.

Of course Yachad has the right of free speech. But it should enunciate that speech from the fringe of Anglo-Jewry, like other groups such as Jews For Jeremy (the far left group that supports Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn). Shamefully though – with the honourable exception of the Zionist Federation, which turned Yachad down for membership – Yachad has been embraced into the heart of the Anglo-Jewish establishment.

The excuse has been the need for a ‘Big Tent’. It is claimed that if Yachad was not there, young  Jews would be drawn to groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians which are even more hostile to Israel. This claim is easily rebutted. In the US, J-Street was rejected for membership of the US Conference of Presidents. But there is no evidence that it has strengthened J-Street and other US groups which are even more antipathetic to Israel – in fact the opposite.

In 2014 Yachad was elected as a member of the UK Board of Deputies, the democratic organisation which represents the UK Jewish community. The vote was 135-61, thus achieving the necessary two-thirds majority. I was one of the 61 and I spoke against the admission. Jonathan Arkush – the current President of the Board – also opposed. Prior to the vote, Yachad had been recommended for membership by the Board’s Constitution Committee. This influenced many Deputies who voted in favour. However the Chair of the Constitution Committee is firmly on the left.  With a different Chair the decision might well have gone the other way.

The Board of Deputies has a Constitutional obligation to “take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.” Yachad clearly violates that obligation.

Petition to Disempower Yachad

Supporting Resolution 2334 showed that Yachad has crossed every red line. As the following petition requests, it is surely time for the Board to admit that it made a mistake in admitting Yachad – and for that mistake to be corrected.

[Petition same as above.]

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