How Israeli lobbying drove Britain to adopt an anti-Palestine policy

In the first week of July, the British parliament passed the second reading of a new legislation innocuously titled the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, taking it one more step closer to becoming a law.

It says that it aims to prevent “public bodies when making decisions about procurement and investment from considering a country or territory of origin or other territorial considerations in a way that indicates political or moral disapproval of a foreign state.”

A Cabinet Office Impact assessment claims the legislation “is required to stop public bodies pursuing their own foreign policy agenda.”

What gives away the real agenda of the proposed law is the tell-tale paragraph, that the Bill “will also prevent divisive behaviour that undermines community cohesion across the country by stopping public bodies from imposing their own boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”

They even spell out what they mean about cohesion: “Such boycotts may legitimise and drive antisemitism as these … campaigns overwhelmingly target Israel.” The briefing states, “there is some evidence to show that hate crimes can be seen to occur alongside boycott and/or divestment campaigns.”

In simple words, the bill aims to curtail the pro-Palestine BDS movement, which has, over the years, found support from local councils, private businesses and especially in universities and colleges.

Launched in 2005, the BDS movement works to put economic pressure on Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Worried by its impact, Israel launched a counter-movement in 2010 through the state-run policy think tank, the Reut Institute. Among its aims was to drive a “wedge” between the hard and soft critics of the Israeli government.

It called for sabotaging the hard critics: “handled uncompromisingly, publicly or covertly as appropriate”, while the soft critics should be targeted by “sophisticated engagement strategies”. We see these strategies at work in the weaponisation of “antisemitism” in the UK.

For example, the UK government, says the BDS movement has resulted in an “increase in antisemitic events” but provides no evidence to back up the outlandish claim.

The Bill is a clear victory for pro-Israel lobbying, introduced in Parliament by one of the most hardline Zionists in the government, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

It’s part of an increasing grip on UK politics by Israel, as seen in the 2030 “roadmap” for increasing the influence of Israel in the UK or the promotion of normalisation via the Abraham Accords.

This is being done through the Abraham Accords UK group, chaired by former Tory defence minister Liam Fox, who was once sacked for being too close to Israel, and directed by Labour member of the House of Lords Jon Mendelsohn, a longtime Israel lobbyist.

But some Zionists have queried the Bill. One is journalist Jonathan Freedland, one of the key ideological enforcers at the Guardian newspaper in their determined campaign to spread smears about “left-wing antisemitism” as a means to remove the pro-Palestine Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership of the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019. He wrote that it was a “bad bill”.

Had he suddenly gone soft and begun standing up for the principles of freedom of thought and collective action? Of course not. Instead, he suggested that the “proof” was that it would stop boycotts of China.

He also argued that it might encourage people on the left to see Zionists as right-wing and opposed to supporters of “human rights”.

This, of course, only bothers those Zionists attempting to cultivate a liberal or faux-leftist image. Among those is the Union of Jewish Students – a pro-Israel student group that oversees all “Jewish societies” on British campuses.

The problem with the Bill is that it might restrict other Zionist intelligence activity, such as against China or other states defined as hostile by the UK government.

But in reality, there are apparent exceptions in the Bill which mean British ministers can create two tiers of foreign states: friends (who cannot legally be boycotted) and enemies (who ministers can decide can be boycotted).

The only exception is that it will be forbidden for anyone to define the Zionist entity as “hostile”.

“If it is meant as some kind of gift,” concluded Freedland, “we should not accept it.” Of course, the bill is not really a gift to the Zionist entity so much as an indication of the total obeisance and capture of the UK by a hostile foreign state.

We can see this in the mass adoption in the UK of the working definition of antisemitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

This is also the Israeli government’s weapon of choice for subduing opposition to settler colonialism in Palestine, adopted in 2016 after more than a decade of lobbying by its army of pro-Israeli lobby groups in the West.

At last count, it has been adopted by (read, imposed on) the government and by a huge list of bodies, including political parties, universities and colleges, most local authorities and many more in the UK. No other state can exert this kind of power over the conduct of political life in the UK, not even the (waning) hegemon of the age - the US.

There are many more signs of the penetration and capture of British political life and, in particular, national security in the interests of the settler colonial state in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Bill should be seen as a package, and along with new Iran sanctions and the National Security Bill, they constitute total state capture by the Zionists. The sanctions target Iran, defined as one of the most hostile states by the UK. The sanctions have been updated twelve times already since the US, UK and Israel “pushed the riot button” in Iran after the alleged “murder” of Mahsa Amini in September last year.

The National Security Bill, which became law on July 11 this year, will also be used not to target the foreign lobby group (the Zionists) but any state that Israel deems an enemy. The deliberately vague offence of potentially assisting a foreign intelligence service has been denounced even by conservative lawmakers.

It carries with it a maximum prison term of 14 years. Even the liberal Guardian complained, “no distinction is drawn between traditionally allied countries such as the US or France and authoritarian hostile or competitor states such as Russia or China.”

But, of course, there will be no prosecutions for exposures which harm the interests of “hostile” states, such as Russia, China or Iran.

Even more unlikely would be any prosecution of the widespread and regular assistance given to Mossad and other “Israeli” intelligence operatives by British Zionists.

It’s not as if the British state has no experience taking on the Zionists. Yes, the British incubated the Zionist terror militias in the 1930s and 40s, but they also fought them directly in 1947-48.

As early as the 1950s, the internal intelligence agency MI5 discovered a high-level Zionist spy in the Joint Intelligence Board. He was sacked, but according to MI5: “The most important conclusion to be drawn…is that the Israeli intelligence service is hostile and attaches values to obtaining intelligence from this country”.

In the 1980s, Mossad’s involvement in the assassination of Palestinian cartoonist Naji al Ali in London’s Knightsbridge led hardline Conservative Prime Minister Margret Thatcher to expel the Mossad officers responsible.

In 2010, the Labour government expelled a Mossad operative over the use of British passports in an assassination of a Hamas commander. Most recently, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs spy Shai Masot was expelled after he was revealed by Al Jazeera to be plotting to "take down" British politicians on right and left.

But the UK is showing no current signs of coming to terms with its abject subservience to Israel. The British Prime Minister is not above appearing at pro-Israel events and sharing the stage with the ambassador to London Tzipi Hotovely, as in this meeting in June this year.

It is now up to the social forces and constituencies in the UK - such as the left and the pro-Palestine movement - which could nudge the British government to take a rational position and not pander to the Israelis alone.