Sir Alan Duncan should be using language judiciously instead of parroting narratives used to hurt Jews for decades
6 April 2024, 15:12 | Updated: 6 April 2024, 15:20
Sir Alan Duncan should be using language judiciously instead of parroting narratives used to hurt Jews for decades, writes the Antisemitism Policy Trust's Chief Executive Danny Stone.
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Speaking on LBC this week, former Minister Sir Alan Duncan said that the Conservative Friends of Israel were “doing the bidding of Netanyahu”, “exercising undue influence at the top of government” and went on to name as an “extremist” Lord Polak, who he said should be removed from parliament for “exercising the interest of another country, not the parliament in which he sits, joined by Lord Pickles”.
In doing so, and this is boringly familiar, he joins a number of other distinguished people who have knowingly or otherwise used racist narratives about Jews.
In 2009, the former British Ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, wrote in the Independent about the news that one of Britain’s best known and respected historians, Sir Martin Gilbert, and another, Sir Lawrence Freedman, “are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism”. His implication was that their Jewish identity would influence their opinions on the government's execution of the Iraq war.
Those with longer memories will remember in 2003 former MP Tam Dalyell, the then Father of the House of Commons, accused then Prime Minister Blair of "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers".
When a Jewish man was announced as the British Ambassador to Israel, the Middle East Monitor posed the question to its readers: Is Britain’s new ambassador to Israel really going to be objective?
Go further back still and in 1894 there was the infamous case of Alfred Dreyfus, the French military captain with Jewish heritage who was exonerated after being tried and convicted for treason, with antisemitic overtones.
The charge of Jewish disloyalty or undue influence is hundreds of years old, and whilst Duncan’s words are cloaked in criticism for support of Israel, the issue is the same. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forgery first published in Russia in around 1903 included 24 protocols detailing what it framed as a sinister Jewish plot to gain world domination, modernising a number of older antisemitic ideas; Jewish control over governments, promoting disorder or wars for Jewish benefit. Jews and their agents taking advantage and exerting influence.
There are innumerable ‘friends of’ groups across the political parties, friends of Cyprus, of Ukraine, of Palestine, and yet over the past two decades one is regularly singled out for charges of undue influence – Israel.
Particularly at a time of conflict, public figures – or former ones like Duncan – need to use their language judiciously. If people want to ask questions about funding, or about particular activities, there is no impediment. If they wish to criticise Israel in extremis, they can and indeed are doing so.
Resorting to a narrative which levels allegations of undue influence, or disloyalty to our nation, particularly against proudly British peers, is not only a gross derogation of duty in setting a non-toxic public discourse, it simply parrots narratives about Jews which have been used to hurt us for decades.
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