LONDON — When rumors spread in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher intended to appoint her chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, as foreign secretary, some Tory MPs quietly grumbled that the prime minister couldn’t appoint a Jew as Britain’s chief diplomat.

Four decades on, amid a grim backdrop of near-historic levels of antisemitic incidents in Britain, there is perhaps one glimmer of light. New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s choice of Ed Miliband, the country’s most senior Jewish politician, as foreign secretary this week evoked no such reaction.

Ironically, however, Miliband — who led the Labour Party in opposition between 2010 and 2015 — has had a long and, at times, uneasy relationship with Britain’s Jewish community. Indeed, his record as Labour leader suggests that will be mirrored in what is likely to be a tense relationship with Israel.

Here’s what to know about Miliband’s rise to the Foreign Office.

After he emerged from Downing Street following Burnham’s decision to send him to the Foreign Office, Miliband immediately referenced his Jewish heritage.

“My parents came to Britain as Jewish refugees from the Nazis,” he stated. “To them, Britain was both a sanctuary and a beacon of hope in the global fight against fascism. I will carry my parents’ faith in that spirit of Britain to my role representing our country.”

Miliband’s family history is a painful one. As he later recalled, when he was seven, he was taken to visit his grandmother in Tel Aviv. Pointing to a black-and-white photograph in her home, the young boy demanded to know who was “that man in the picture.” He was quickly taken from the room and quietly told that the man — David, his grandfather — had died in Poland many years before he was born. Only some years later did Miliband realize that his mother’s father had been murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish.

Miliband’s parents, however, escaped the gas chambers. Fleeing Belgium as the German armies overran it in 1940, his 16-year-old father, who later adopted the name Ralph, caught the last boat from Ostend to Britain. In Poland, his mother, together with her sister and mother, was sheltered throughout the war, initially by nuns. Marion Kozak made it to Britain seven years after her future husband.

Miliband and his brother David were not brought up as part of the Jewish community. As he wrote in a 2012 essay, Marion and Ralph, a renowned Marxist academic, “defined themselves not by their Jewishness but by their politics.”

Politics ran in both ferociously bright boys’ blood. David became a youthful aide to Tony Blair in opposition, headed the Downing Street Policy Unit during Labour’s first term in office after its 1997 landslide, and himself became an MP in 2001 and a minister swiftly thereafter. Ed attached himself to the other architect of the centrist New Labour project, Gordon Brown. When Brown became chancellor in 1997, he became a senior adviser in the Treasury, before following his brother into parliament in 2005.

‘The era of New Labour has passed’

On Brown’s arrival in Downing Street as prime minister in 2007, he appointed both David and Ed to his Cabinet. David went to the Foreign Office, while Ed became energy secretary. Ed, the younger and more left-leaning of the brothers, was, politically, the more junior. But, when Brown resigned following Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election, he confounded expectations by running against and narrowly beating his brother to attain the party leadership.

Miliband immediately announced a rupture with the government in which he had loyally served just months earlier, boldly declaring: “The era of New Labour has passed.” In his first speech as Labour leader, he denounced the Iraq War Blair had joined in 2003. Also in 2010, he signaled that he would abandon the staunchly pro-Israel line that had been a hallmark of New Labour. “The Gaza blockade must be lifted, and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen,” Miliband stated.

The significance of........

© The Times of Israel