Britain Appoints Ed Miliband, Jewish Former Labour Leader, as New Foreign Secretary

Ed Miliband, former leader of the UK Labour Party and a prominent left-wing politician, has been appointed as the new British Foreign Secretary by Prime Minister Andy Burnham. At 56, Miliband becomes the fourth Jewish individual to hold this position, following his older brother David Miliband, who served under Gordon Brown. Miliband identifies as a secular or cultural Jew, raised in an atheist household by his Marxist sociologist father, Ralph Miliband. Both of his parents were Jewish refugees from Poland who escaped Nazi persecution, with his maternal grandmother surviving thanks to Polish Righteous Among the Nations, while his maternal grandfather perished in the Holocaust. This family history deeply influences Miliband's worldview and sensitivity to antisemitism.

Miliband has strong family ties to Israel, including first and second cousins living in the West Bank, as well as relatives affiliated with the Gur and Aleksander Hasidic communities in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem, and others residing in kibbutzim across Israel. He first visited Israel at age seven to see his grandmother, who found refuge there after World War II. Politically, Miliband supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has criticized the current Netanyahu government's policies. He backed British parliamentary recognition of a Palestinian state but firmly opposes the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, advocating for negotiation as the only path to peace.