This is a guest post from Jonathan Sacerdoti.

David Miliband, the British Government’s Foreign Minister, is Jewish. So some might have expected his Question and Answer session held last night at the London Jewish Cultural Centre to be an easy ride for him. However, Miliband and the Government’s actions, especially relating to Israel’s operations in Gaza last winter, invited plenty of challenging and hostile questions.

Organised by the Jewish News, this question and answer session was a wonderful opportunity for a small group of 150 people from the British Jewish community to challenge a cabinet minister directly. They ran a similar event with Nick Clegg a few months ago but appeared to have learnt from the experience, and this time had a much more even-handed chairman fielding the questions (the Sky News political Editor Adam Boulton). Boulton was not afraid to put Miliband through his paces on contentious topics.

Sure enough, after a peculiar and irrelevant first question on the recession (what relevance did that have to a one-hour Jewish Q&A with the Foreign Secretary?), the debate proper was kicked off by champion activist Jonathan Hoffman, co-vice chairman of the Zionist Federation, who challenged the Foreign Secretary on several fronts: Why had he failed to legislate, as he had promised during his visit to Israel some months ago, to prevent the embarrassing situation where Israeli  politicians and army representatives visiting the UK could be arrested here under so-called universal jurisdiction? Why had he called Operation Cast Lead, a defensive operation designed to stop Hamas’ eight-year-long rocket attacks on the southern Israeli civilian population, “disproportionate”? And did he stand by that evaluation now?

Miliband appeared somewhat surprised by these very direct questions, but sure enough declared that he stood by his assessment of Cast Lead as ‘disproportionate’ because of the number of casualties and deaths it caused. Luckily, I got to follow up Jonathan Hoffman’s question with one of my own. I asked him how he could use those figures as a measure of proportionality when Hamas famously deliberately launches rockets from behind civilians, whereas Israel defends its civilians and fights to protect them, rather than using them as a human shield. If civilian areas of Britian were under fire from constant rocket attacks, would he wait eight weeks, eight months, or eight years (as Israel did) before retaliating? What length of time would he feel was ‘proportionate’? His response was that we cannot even compare a terrorist group and its activities with those of a democratic state, and he was surprised I had even mentioned them in the same sentence. (Why?) Thus, no doubt, he felt he had deflected the question. But as later questioners pointed out, all he had really done was illustrate that his line of argument essentially excuses terrorists by granting them immunity from retaliation. He never did quite get round to sharing what he would do in such a situation, and how long he’d hold back before doing it (but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be eight years).

When it came to defending Britain’s shameful failure last week to vote on a resolution endorsing the disgraceful Goldstone Report, Miliband had little to say in his defense. He insisted that Britain was in the middle of complex negotiations, which the vote would have interrupted, but as pointed out in the Times, that excuse is no more than the diplomatic equivalent of ‘the dog ate my homework’. Given the chance to vote against endorsing the report, as the USA rightly did, Britain failed to even abstain. And nothing Miliband could say last night would satisfy the questioners in the audience who pushed him for a decent explanation.

Ultimately it was a frustrating event, in that way these sorts of things often are. Politicians are expert at not answering the questions you ask them. If you are critical, they know just how to talk around the subject for long enough to distract the audience, and move on to the next question. But Miliband’s answers, if taken in combination, showed a clear lack of logic. Without the opportunity to follow any one line of argument for a longer time, it’s impossible to know how he makes them join up in his own head.

Frustrating as they may be, these events are important. The Jewish News has done the community a great service in setting them up, and I hope they go from strength to strength (the next one is with Boris Johnson). The important thing is that the politicians who take the time to answer questions from the Jewish community should discover that we are willing to ask very tough questions, and expect decent answers. Because even if we don’t get those answers on the night, they might think harder in future about how their actions, regarding Israel in particular, might resonate with British Jews.

Britain is still a pretty good place to be Jewish, but that should never be taken for granted. With the rise in antisemitism becoming ever more palpable, it’s imperative that British Jews speak out as often and as loudly as possible against wrong decisions and declarations about Israel at government level. We must work towards establishing a strong Jewish, pro-Israel lobby. Eventually, that might have some effect on policy decisions, and that can only be a good thing.