There’s an old joke about two Jews stranded on a desert island who spend years building three synagogues.  When they are eventually rescued, they are asked why three, given there are only two of them.  They explain “that’s the synagogue he goes to, that’s the one I go to and that’s the one that neither of us would be seen dead in…”

The idea that there is a homogenous Jewish opinion about anything is for the birds, and even more so when it comes to Israel.  

Both branches of my family were already largely living in the UK by 1900 and even before.  My parents, who were both committed liberal Jews, went to synagogue weekly but never visited Israel.  “It was too hot” they would explain unironically, while regularly holidaying in Egypt and Jordan.  

For them, Israel was just another possible holiday destination and, in common with many British Jews of that generation, they would shy away from any behaviour that might suggest a special affinity with Israel.  Their goal was to demonstrate unwavering allegiance to Britain – it was their home and Judaism was their religion, not their nationality.

Ed Miliband’s Jewish journey is different, as he explained in his speech to the Commons recently, in which he announced sanctions against goods from Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Unlike my grandparents, his were aggressively secular but nevertheless had to escape from Nazi Germany under racial purity laws.  Sixty other relatives of his were less lucky and died in the camps.

He talks movingly of visiting his grandmother in Israel and picking oranges on her kibbutz in the 1970s.  In contrast to my family experience, for Miliband, Israel is a necessary sanctuary for Jews.  

So, Miliband, while speaking as a British Jew, can no more claim to speak for British Jewry than I can.  Yet Miliband does speak for the British Government and it is absurd and distasteful for Israeli Government spokespersons to accuse him – a Jew – of stoking anti-Semitism by opposing Jewish settler violence on the West Bank.  

The long history of Israel’s occupation of this territory is complicated, a partially unintended consequence of a war that Israel had not sought but nevertheless won.   

Had there been a partner for peace in 1967 it is more than conceivable that – with the exception of East Jerusalem and the Old City – the then Israeli Government would have relinquished the conquered land immediately, in return for national recognition.  Instead, an illegal occupation grew out of a lack of alternatives: the PLO was explicitly committed to Israel’s destruction, while the Jordanians had no more legal claim to the territory than the Israelis.  Without a peace settlement, a nine-mile wide Israel would have been deeply vulnerable to further attacks.

Over time, however, Jewish nationalists and religious zealots saw an opportunity to expand Israeli territory and took advantage of successive weak coalition governments and Arab and Palestinian political inertia to exert an ever tighter grip on the West Bank.  Without an obvious alternative – at least after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin – the world stood by and allowed the Israeli right to create facts on the ground to embed the occupation ever more permanently.

All of this was a tragic missed opportunity, but the recent settler violence is of a different order.  It is one thing to occupy territory, another to discriminate against its residents, and quite another to seek to drive them from their homes through terror.  Miliband correctly describes this as ethnic cleansing and it is an anathema to many British Jews.

Israel has its roots in providing sanctuary for Jews escaping the Holocaust and anti-Semitism across much of the Arab world and the former Soviet Union.  Today, the behaviour of its government and the settler movement is being used by anti-Semites to attack Jews in Britain and elsewhere.  In no way are such attacks justified, but nor should the claim of anti-Semitism be used to insulate the Israeli government from criticism.  

So let me be clear, as one Jew to another, while what should become of the administered territories of Judea and Samaria or the West Bank or whatever you want to call them remains complicated, unprovoked attacks on Palestinian civilians are not.  Forcing Palestinians from the homes and villages in which they have lived for many centuries cannot be justified.   And allowing Jews to terrorise their neighbours with the aim of making them move is not only unjustified, it is ethnic cleansing and it is un-Jewish and offensive to Jewish values – I am proud that a British Jew should act in their defence. 

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