"The British Have Lost Their Minds": When America's Ambassador to Israel Says Out Loud What Jerusalem Thinks Quietly

The scene is exceedingly rare in diplomacy: an American ambassador frontally accusing the government in London — Washington's historic ally — of antisemitism. "The British have lost their minds. The Jew hatred from their government knows no bounds, nor facts," Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, wrote Saturday on X.

The trigger: a video by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband describing the situation in Gaza as "appalling" and citing "blocked medicines" and "children dying while waiting for vital supplies." Israel's Foreign Ministry fired back, accusing Miliband of "ignoring the facts" and "making a video aimed at public opinion," pointing out that 22,500 tons of medical supplies have entered Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire.

Let's be precise: the word "antisemitism," applied to Ed Miliband — himself the son of Jewish refugees — is a heavy weapon, and Huckabee drew it with unusual bluntness. But reducing the affair to a rhetorical excess would miss the point. Because on substance, the ambassador is pointing at a real mechanism: a British government that, under Andy Burnham — who arrived in July judging his predecessor Keir Starmer "too accommodating toward Israel" — has made anti-Israel one-upmanship an explicit political axis, going as far as weighing measures against Israel over the West Bank, at the risk of retaliation already announced by Jerusalem.

What this episode reveals is a historic reversal of roles. For decades, the Anglo-American "special relationship" served as the bedrock of a common Western position on the Middle East. That bedrock has just cracked in public. Washington, through its most exposed ambassador, is now openly saying that London's Israel policy is no longer a difference of judgment, but a moral drift. That is major diplomatic cover for Israel — and a chilling signal for British Jews, who see their own government placed in the dock by the American ally.

And here is the angle almost no one is highlighting: the precedent Huckabee is setting. By naming the policy of an allied government — not that of a hostile regime — as "antisemitism," he is moving the red line. Until now, the accusation was reserved for Israel's declared enemies; from now on, it can strike a G7 partner. It's risky, because a weapon can dull with overuse. But it may also be the only language European chancelleries still understand: the language of reputational cost. If criticizing Israel without factual rigor now means facing public indictment by Washington, every European ministry will think twice before the next video "aimed at public opinion."

The real question, then, is not whether Huckabee went too far. It is whether Europe grasps that its rhetorical one-upmanship on Gaza is costing it something it thought it had for good: America's presumption of good faith.