In the last week, a ferocious debate has broken out inside Britain’s Jewish community about Israel’s reputation and what to do about it. As a matter of principle, I do not get involved in community politics in the UK. I am not Jewish and it is, therefore, none of my business.

However, this time around I have unwittingly become part of the story. It all began on July 21 with an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which I attempted to outline reasons for the precipitious decline in Israel’s standing in the UK in recent months. It was bad to begin with, I argued, but it has recently taken a nose-dive. A week later, Vivian Wineman, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews also had a piece in the Jerusalem Post in which he essentially argued that there was nothing to worry about in Britain (see July 28 blog entry). Mr. Wineman is a former chairman of British Friends of Peace Now. My analysis, he said, was “misguided and alarmist”.

On Wednesday, I was asked by the London-based Jewish Chronicle to offer some of my thoughts on the matter.

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The global NGO community is at it again. According to this year’s Global Peace Index, released by the widely respected Vision of Humanity grouping, Israel ranks 141 out of 144 countries surveyed. Only Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq are ranked lower. In terms of human rights, Israel is ranked at the same level as North Korea and Iran. Indeed, apart from Iran and Yemen, all of the countries in the Middle East are given a higher ranking.

The index draws its inspiration from a United Nations initiative in 1999 when, according to the report’s authors, “the UN General Assembly launched a programme of action to build a “culture of peace” for the world’s children, which envisaged working towards a positive peace of justice, tolerance and plenty.” No real mystery then over what is about to follow.

The rankings are constructed out of 23 indicators of internal and external peace. These include factors such as the number of conflicts fought over the last five years, the potential for terrorism, ease of access to weapons, and human rights. Each category is graded on a scale of one to five, where one is the best score and five the worst.

Ostensibly, the survey is a value-neutral study which highlights objective realities about a nation’s predicament. The top ranked country in the study is New Zealand which makes sense given the nation’s remoteness and the absence of violent neighbours. Israel, a country under the constant threat of terrorism and living under the shadow of countries such as Iran which call for its destruction, would, logically enough, be given a relatively low ranking.

But this survey is anything but value-neutral, as closer inspection of its attitudes to human rights makes abundantly clear.

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Well, let me confess to feeling a little perplexed today and let me also ask whether someone could enlighten me as to what precisely is going on. The top and bottom of it is that Vivian Wineman, the President of the Board of British Jews, has chosen to write a piece in the Jerusalem Post seeking to refute my own piece of last week on the increasing hostility to Israel in the British mainstream.

Since being elected to his position in May, this appears to be the first article in a major international newspaper that Mr. Wineman has written. In other words, he is setting out his stall on Britain’s relationship with Israel. It is an important moment for him, and he has used that moment to argue that although there are a few problems, there is really very little to worry about. Wineman, a former chairman of British Friends of Peace Now, had the following points to make:

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After a break of more than 24 hours (!), the Guardian’s campaign against Israel has resumed in some style with a truly ludicrous piece of writing designed to tarnish Israel’s reputation as a free society. I have written before about the opportunistic nature of the Guardian’s near daily assault on the Jewish state. But even by the paper’s any-stick-will-do standards, this one takes the biscuit.

Following one of the usual templates, the Guardian’s editorial team has dragged out a far-Left Israeli peacenik who is all too willing to buy his 15 minutes of fame by selling out the reputation of his country. This time around, the author, Gal Wettstein, has been given the task of trashing Israel’s reputation for free speech. The way in which this fits into the broader campaign of deligitimisation is clear. One of Israel’s most powerful defences is that it is the Middle East’s only free society. For anti-Israeli campaigners, that defence needs to be undermined…if at all possible.

The problem is that since Israel is in fact a genuinely free society with a commitment to free speech as strong as any in the Western world, the piece that emerges is so bad that, in places, it is difficult to avoid laughing out loud.

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As the anti-Israeli atmosphere in Britain intensifies by the day, Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee has now called on the British government to end its policy of not talking to the extreme anti-Semitic terror group Hamas while simultaneously urging the European Union to make its relationship with Israel conditional on good behaviour, the BBC is reporting today. The report was also carried in French and English by France’s top news agency, Agence France Presse.

The cross party group headed by Labour MP Michael Gapes — a self-declared friend of Israel — said that the policy of non-engagement with Hamas was ineffective. While criticising Hamas rocket attacks, it condemned Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza as “disproportionate”, criticised the blockade of Gaza, condemned settlement growth and urged the British Foreign Office to declare openly whether it believed Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza.

The committee had recommended reaching out to “moderates” in Hamas in 2007 but said such calls now had new impetus since Britain had begun engaging with the political wing of Hezbollah earlier this year.

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