Last Sunday, Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl said she would be recommending to her Executive that the Board seeks a meeting with the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. The purpose of such a meeting would not be to discuss rising levels of antisemitism, the increased number of violent incidents towards Jews in the UK, the BDS movement and its Jew-hating undertones nor the potential threats to the Jewish way of life in this country. Any of these objectives for a frank conversation with the Home Secretary would be entirely appropriate and indeed desirable.
Rather, the meeting would be demanded in order to convey the Board’s opposition to government plans to processing illegal immigrants in Rwanda.
It is my contention that the Board has no place in asking for such a meeting because the issue does not relate to the lives, circumstances or welfare of the Jewish community in the UK. Certainly, many individual Jews will have an opinion on the issue, yet the same is true for the 99.5% of the population who are not Jewish. It is therefore totally inappropriate for an entity which regards itself as the representative body of Jews in the UK to be wasting capital – both of a political and of a financial nature – on this issue.
Political capital is being wasted because any time spent with the Home Secretary will be important and a limited resource, and must be devoted to matters facing the Jewish community at the present time. That is what I believe the community wants, as it struggles with many issues that are specifically related to us as Jews. From a tactical perspective, too, the criticism of her signature policy as opposed to working constructively with her for the betterment of Jewish life in Britain is hardly a way to build positive relations with the government.
Financial capital is also wasted because the Board appears to be allocating resources, via the medium of a “social justice committee” which reports directly to the President, to issues such as refugees and climate change which, however important, are not ones which affect Jews more than anyone else. In our democracy, the lobbying for and political promotion of these initiatives should come from political parties, pressure groups and research organisations and not from representative bodies of religious denominations whose members hold diverse views on subjects not directly related to their faith.
It appears that the Board’s justification for its approach is that it is supposedly in support of “Jewish values”. The problem with this argument is that there is no widely accepted set of concepts of what constitutes “Jewish values” and the expression is regularly used to justify politically left-wing policies. Interpretations of the Torah and other Jewish texts differ and are best left to rabbis and theologians rather than lay people appropriating them for political ends. The idea that Jewish values necessarily extend to supporting huge flows of uncontrolled immigration from refugees who are, very importantly, already in safe countries is a staggering assumption.
An additional aspect of this debate is the attempt to portray the plight of such refugees as being similar to that of Jews seeking to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There is simply no comparison. Nazi Germany viewed the Jews as an entire ethnic group, targeted ultimately for extermination. Today’s refugees might well be suffering, but most are seeking to leave their home countries for a better life elsewhere. They have not been singled out for murder based on their religion or race. Moreover, genuine refugees are happy for a refuge anywhere if it means they will gain freedom from persecution, and that would also have been the case for German Jews in the 1930s.
In summary, for the Jewish community in the UK today, the issue of the government’s Rwanda Partnership is not important in our capacity of being Jews, even though we might have our own personal views. This contrasts with Jewish interests - matters relating to Jewish life here and now, supporting the state of Israel and fighting the sickness of Jew hatred. Fortunately, in the National Jewish Assembly, the Jewish community now has a membership organisation which does indeed focus exclusively on these issues, and rather than alienate the government of the day it will seek to engage constructively to make Britain an even better place in the world for Jews to live.
Gary Mond is Chairman of the National Jewish Assembly.
