A group of prominent British Jews has formed a new organisation which rejects uncritical support of Israel.
The Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, actor Stephen Fry and film director Mike Leigh are among almost 150 high-profile figures who have joined Independent Jewish Voices (IJV).
advertisement
Other signatories to the group’s founding declaration, calling for freer debate about the Middle East, include the fashion designer Nicole Farhi and the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
The group’s website declares: “The initiative was born out of a frustration with the widespread misconception that the Jews of this country speak with one voice - and that this voice supports the Israeli government’s policies.
“Our project is to create a climate and a space in which Jews of different affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being dismissed as self-hating.”
The IJV’s principles also include the belief that both Palestinians and Israelis have a right to peace and security, and the condemnation of Islamophobia as well as anti-Semitism.
One of the signatories to the declaration has explicitly criticised the Board of Deputies of British Jews, seen as the mouthpiece of Britain’s Jewish community, for devoting “much of the time and resources of its international division to the defence of Israel”.
Brian Klug, the Oxford University philosopher, also criticises Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, for telling a pro-Israeli rally in London last year: “Israel, you make us proud.”
“Others felt roughly the opposite emotion,” Mr Klug writes in an article today for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website.
A group of almost 150 prominent British Jews has launched a new organisation, Independent Jewish Voices, and criticized the British Jewish establishment for its uncritical views on Israel. An open letter titled "A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices" was published in Monday's edition of the ''Times of London'' and reprinted on the ''Guardian'''s online site, stated that the group has "come together in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole" and that the leaders of Britain's Jewish community, the Board of Deputies, has "consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people," referring to Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip areas, which have been occupied and illegally settled by Israel since 1967.

The letter was signed by over 140 prominent writers, actors, academics and intellectuals including author and writer Stephen Fry, academic Brian Klug, historian Eric Hobsbawm and film director Mike Leigh.

Klug, in an article published in ''the Guardian'' announcing the launch of the group, argues for its necessity by asserting that the Board of Deputies actions in defence of Israel "suggests that British Jewry, speaking with one voice, stands solidly behind the Israeli government and its military operations," despite the fact that, according to Klug, "Jews were deeply divided over Israel's campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon last year."

The launching of the new group comes on the heels of a dispute within the American Jewish community after the American Jewish Congress published an essay titled "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism" in which criticism by liberal Jews of Israel was criticized as facilitating antisemitism.