The contrast between the moderately worded letter and the extreme response it received could hardly have been more striking. In a rare move, 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews — the largest and oldest body representing Jews in the U.K. — published an open letter in the Financial Times, criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza. Writing that they “cannot turn a blind eye or remain silent” over the loss of lives, the signatories claimed that “Israel’s soul is being ripped out” by its extremist government. “Silence is seen as support for policies and actions that run contrary to our Jewish values,” they wrote, expressing solidarity with the families of the Israeli hostages still in Gaza and the “hundreds and thousands” of Israelis protesting their own government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
In subsequent media rounds that day, signatories to the letter spoke about the motivations behind the move. On BBC Radio 4’s “World at One” program, board member Philip Goldenberg mentioned Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza after a short ceasefire collapsed in early March. “Look, this war could have come to an end and the hostages could have been released,” he said. “Netanyahu deliberately revived it so as to lure back into his government some bigoted, extreme racists to keep his majority, so he doesn’t lose office. It’s as simple as that.” The missive in the Financial Times described this as the “Itamar offensive,” since reviving the war was the condition imposed by far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir for his return to Netanyahu’s coalition government. Since the end of the ceasefire, over 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, while Israel has imposed an eight-week total blockade, with the U.N. World Food Programme now reporting that its food stocks in Gaza have run out.
What followed the letter’s publication was an uncharacteristically public bust-up within the British Jewish community. The board’s president, Phil Rosenberg, penned a response to the signatories in Jewish News, a free weekly newspaper. Describing their missive as the manifestation of a “deeply regrettable loss of perspective” over the war, he chastised the rebel 36, just over 10% of the board, for failing to blame Hamas for the war and accused them of claiming to represent the entirety of the organization. He also “urged us all to remember that unity is strength. Division serves only our enemies.” The 36 were denounced in a flurry of op-eds, press statements and social media posts from British and Israeli Jews alike. They are understood to have received a spate of written abuse. Rosenberg was hauled over the coals by 90 representatives of the United Synagogue, the largest body for Britain’s Orthodox Jewish community, in a “fiery” online meeting, during which he was urged to take action against the letter-writers. Then the board announced that the 36 would face a disciplinary process; one signatory, Harriet Goldenberg, was suspended as vice chair of the board’s international division while the investigation was taking place.
This dramatic and heavy-handed response is of a piece with other actions by a British-Jewish representative body that has long been fanatic in its gatekeeping of views about Israel. When it comes to the catastrophic war in Gaza, one former board member in his 30s told New Lines that the organization “has become increasingly myopic when facing what has been described as a genocide and livestreamed into our phones 24 hours a day. They are trying to pretend they can put their heads in the sand and not see it.” But the letter from the 36 dissenters exposes a deep division within the British Jewish community, which numbers fewer than 300,000 people and represents some 0.5% of the U.K. population. Much like mainstream diaspora Jewish organizations elsewhere, notably in the U.S., this fragmentation has become more pronounced and fractious over the decimation of Gaza following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when armed men killed 1,200 people and abducted more than 200 hostages. The war has so far killed over 50,000 Palestinians, according to international humanitarian organizations; most of the dead are civilians, including an estimated 17,000 children. The war has created thousands of child amputees in Gaza, more than anywhere else in the world. It has made the Gaza Strip unlivable, destroying hospitals, schools, universities, orchards, greenhouses, mosques and more. And it has been described as genocidal by experts on the subject.
The rebel 36 — and others who spoke to New Lines — suggest that perhaps twice as many board members would have signed the letter had they known about it, or not been afraid to do so. Meanwhile, that there is a growing divergence over Israel within Britain’s tiny Jewish community is borne out by the available data on the subject. In polling from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an independent body, 88% of British Jews do not support the current Israeli prime minister. The vast majority agree with the statement that Netanyahu “prioritises his own personal interests over those of the State of Israel as a whole.” And while a majority of British Jews feel some attachment to Israel, nearly 30% self-define as non- or anti-Zionist, while 51% of 16- to 29-year-olds do not identify as Zionist. It’s worth pointing out that self-described Zionists may not agree with positions taken by the board (several told New Lines emphatically that they do not). But taken as a whole these figures show that, far from being an unrepresentative fringe, the letter-writers echo a sizable constituency of British Jews.
And that constituency is not served, or even acknowledged, by the body that claims to speak for it. A spokesperson for Na’amod, a British Jewish group opposing the occupation that last year launched a campaign calling on British Jews to divest from the board, told New Lines: “This is an organization that chooses the project of defending the Israeli right over the project of representing Jewish communities in Britain, where the two conflict.” The board has backed Israel during its assault on Gaza, while urging the British government to ban marches protesting the war. It opposed U.K. parliamentary motions for a ceasefire. When the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza in May 2024, the board decreed that the court had “no jurisdiction over this matter.” When the U.K. government issued a limited suspension of arms sales to Israel, over concerns that it was breaching international law, the board’s president said the decision was “a mistake” and “gives succor to Hamas.”
Such reactionary statements long predate the current Gaza war. Led by Yachad in 2018, over 500 British Jews signed an open letter over the board’s one-sided reaction to the deaths of Palestinians during the Great March of Return, a series of Friday demonstrations of unarmed people at the security barrier Israel had built on the de facto Gaza border. At least 200 Palestinians were killed and at least 36,000 injured as the Israeli army responded with live bullets to the mass protests. The board blamed Hamas for the violence. In 2007, more than 100 prominent Jewish figures, including the playwrights Harold Pinter and Gillian Slovo and the writer Jacqueline Rose, set up Independent Jewish Voices partly in response to the board’s uncritical support for Israel.
Such positioning goes to the heart of the question of what the board was actually set up to do. Established in 1760 as an advocacy group for British Jewish interests, the board was not always a Zionist organization. In fact, in a historical echo with present-day dissenters, in 1917 the board’s own president, David Lindo Alexander, wrote a joint letter to The Times with Claude Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, rejecting Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. They objected on the grounds that it would label Jews anywhere in the world as “strangers in their native lands” and could lead to antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty. The board moved to censure its own president over that letter, reflecting a community-wide split in opinion at the time. While the board’s position had historically prioritized assimilation to British society and loyalty to the U.K., its stance shifted so that by the mid-1940s it backed Zionism.
But now the board’s right-or-wrong loyalty to Israel is dismaying for a substantial section of Britain’s Jewish population and much more so among a younger demographic. Their sense of alienation from the board’s position is compounded by the fact that it casts disagreement as fringe or marginal. (I should say that I had my own run-in with the board a few years ago, when I publicly disagreed with Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, over the appropriateness of drawing comparisons between the present day and Nazi Germany. A colorfully worded and hastily deleted tweet was posted from the board’s official account and ultimately led to a news story in The Guardian with the headline: “Board of Deputies of British Jews Apologises for Calling Journalist an ‘Asshole.’”)
Tony Kushner, a historian at Southampton University who specializes in modern British Jewish history, said: “There is a growing censorship extending far beyond those that are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, from an incredibly intolerant elite [at the board].” This is the context for the dissenting letter. One active member of the Jewish community in his 60s told New Lines that the board has been unwilling to accept that “a sizable part of the Anglo-Jewish community is very upset and angry with what the Israeli government is doing” and added: “It is really important that the debate is opened up. There’s this sense that anybody who wants to criticize Israel at the moment is being shut down.”
Hannah Weisfeld, director of Yachad UK, which is a member of the board and builds British Jewish support for a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says the letter’s signatories tried for months to raise the differences of opinion internally: “They have been getting more and more frustrated and tried through other means to make the point that there are large numbers of people in the British Jewish community who do not support the Israeli government and think the war is a disaster.” A former deputy agrees, noting that more progressive deputies have been “constantly trying to put forward a different narrative and constantly told to be quiet.”
The 36 are currently not giving further media interviews while they ponder their next move. Several Jewish organizers and community members told me there seems little point in the letter-writers now folding in retreat, with wrists slapped, especially given the need to speak up for a substantial constituency within British Jewry that is unrepresented by the board. Tony Kushner says: “Now the genie is out of the bottle and I don’t think it can be put back. It has damaged the board and questions will be asked about the authority of its leadership.” Echoing the position of Na’amod, one organizer noted that endeavors to change the board from within are naive and futile: “They want to be inside the tent, but the tent doesn’t want them in it.” Amid Israel’s era-defining war in Gaza and its descent into authoritarianism, in the face of profound questions over morality, ethics and commitments to humanitarian law, it may well be the moment to walk away and start something new.
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