Misplaced censure

VI have the utmost respect for the Board of Deputies and its president, but consider the action voted upon against JNF to be misplaced (Board passes motion censuring JNF UK over chair’s ‘bigoted’ remarks, thejc. com, 23 January).

The JNF has for many years carried out wonderful work supporting projects within Israel. Why should the words of its chairman, in his own capacity, be relevant?

I feel very sorry for the hard workers behind JNF activities and hope that this action does not inhibit its work and support.

From what I have read, statements by Mr Hayek may have been badly phrased with a confusion between Islam as a religion and Islamic extremism. Simon Rocker, in his article refers to Mr Hayek’s statement that he “has always been committed to fighting prejudice.”

This action by the Board is hypocritical when no action was taken over the promotion by a staff member of Yachad, a deputy group of BOD, of the Kaddish for Gaza in 2018. Mervyn Smith

Cheam Surrey

VYou report that Education Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, intends to criminalise Hamas’s chant “from the river to the sea”, rightly calling Hamas an antisemitic, intolerant, murderous, proscribed organisation.

Its self-declared, unambiguous meaning is the destruction of Israel and its replacement by a Jew-free Palestinian state.

Imam Abdullah Antepil of Duke University and the Muslim Leadership Initiative concurs that it is a “genocidal chant, an antisemitic slogan”.

Yet Hannah Weisfeld, director of “pro peace, pro Israel” Yachad, tweets: “This is not a police matter” and “attempting to criminalise it is dangerous for everyone”.

In her view it is part of a “national narrative” for those who want Israel replaced by a bi-national state, and as such justified.

She further ludicrously suggests that should the slogan be criminalised, by extension JNF’s blue collection boxes should be reported to the police for showing the entirety of the land west of the Jordan river, carrying Ben-Gurion’s quote, “The future of Israel lies in the Negev”. JNF has never been known to call for anyone’s destruction.

To argue against criminalising antisemitic behaviour and the call for Israel’s destruction as Yachad, a Board of Deputies affiliated group, does, cannot be considered to be pro-Israel, but the Board gives it free reign to spout its anti-Israel invectives, despite the Board’s constitutional requirement to “take such positive steps as possible to promote Israel’s security, welfare and standing”.

Last week Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s president, sent a damning letter of censure to the trustees of JNF for their “failure” to deal with chairman Samuel Hayek’s comments on the future of Anglo Jewry, after having made the position of the Board’s senior VP, the JNF’s deputy, untenable. He resigned.

In her first plenary in 2018 in answer to calls for censure of the “Kaddish for Hamas” deputies, and to Yachad’s call for the Board to speak out against Israel, she answered that, “I welcome the vibrant diversity of opinion in the UK” and “this is our democratic tradition”.

The reality is that she presides over a Board which silences and actively seeks to remove deputies who speak out with a strong Zionist message under the flimsiest of pretexts, the “democratic tradition” being solely the preserve of the hard left at the BoD.

It urgently needs to be replaced by a truly representative body that supports Israel in line with the views of mainstream Anglo Jewry.

James R Windsor

London E11