A spokesman for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the government’s move to impose sanctions on Israel and said “no one here in Israel wants to see Ed Miliband in Israel”.
Asked why Labour is picking a fight with Israel at the moment, David Mencer told GB News: “I think that’s pretty obvious. What they’re doing right now is trying to do British politics and masquerading it as foreign policy. Just look at the timing. It’s on the very eve of the Jewish High Holidays, designed to cause maximum upset to Britain’s Jewish community weeks before the Labour Party conference and during an Israeli election campaign.
“So our position is that these measures are strictly delivered because of Labour’s domestic political pressures, not by any realistic expectation of changing policy on the ground. This is about affecting most probably the electorate of Holborn and St Pancras.
“They know they’re losing ground to the Greens, so they’re trying to outflank them on the left. The thing is, it will fail because no one trusts them here in Israel, and I’m pretty sure that no one will trust Labour on the streets of Holborn and St Pancras.”
On pro-Palestine protesters outside Parliament demanding that Labour go even further, Mencer said: “Well, that’s what happens when you try and appease bullies. It’s never enough. The steps that you try to make to appease the bully is never enough. They will try and push you further and further to the extremes.
“And this is what this is: Student Union foreign policy. Make a declaration, applaud yourself in the student bar, and satisfy your activists, and achieve absolutely nothing when it comes to peace in this part of the world.
“I think this is a ridiculous policy. It’s nakedly for domestic politics. Nothing to do with us here in Israel. But what it does do, and I can tell you this for sure, is that it makes every single British Jew think to themselves: number one, Labour has betrayed me, and number two, is there a future for Britain’s Jewish community to stay where they are. I think most will be rubbing their heads and thinking probably not.”
Asked if Miliband could be banned from Israel, he said: “Ed Miliband is very much a failed figure. If you look at what he’s done on net zero, he’s a joke. His run to be prime minister was a joke, and what he’s doing is that he’s doing the same thing that he’s done in his career, except he’s dragging the whole country down with him, and Britain is sacrificing the very influence which it actually wants, and that’s the irony of this whole thing.
“Britain says it wants greater influence over the future of peace in this region, over all of the challenges which our people around here face – Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs alike, but the irony is, is that by pursuing this ridiculous student grandstanding, it just means that they have removed the influence that they once had.
“I compare it very much to France, mildly annoying but ultimately irrelevant. Miliband has made Britain irrelevant.”
Pressed again on a ban, he said: “I’m speaking from the Prime Minister’s office, and I’ll tell you very, very clearly that no one here in Israel wants to see Ed Miliband in Israel.”
