I am reposting the following article written by journalist Mark Curtis as published by Consortium News along with additional information regarding the extremely strong Israeli Lobby in the UK, which at minimum appears to control the UK’s response to the genocidal bombing of Gaza, of Palestinians, along with the Zionist controlled legacy media’s reporting.
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The two key reasons are the need for Whitehall to demonstrate British subservience and usefulness to the US, and the power of the Israel lobby, writes Declassified’s editor Mark Curtis.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Oct. 19, 2023. (Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0)
Rishi Sunak’s government has shown extraordinary levels of backing for Israeli military operations in Gaza over the past six weeks. As the Palestinian death toll has mounted, neither Sunak nor any other minister has condemned Israel for any of its policies.
Rather, ministers have explicitly supported Israel’s illegal collective punishment of Gaza and its evacuation order to over a million people in the north of the territory. This was, it turns out, the precursor for attacks further down the Gaza Strip.
Throughout the atrocities, British ministers have stuck to a patently absurd line claiming Israel’s “right to self-defence” as it destroys whole residential districts and as Israel’s own ministers use overtly genocidal language.
U.K. Conservative and Labour officials have been lining up to “stand by Israel” but almost none even dare to say they “stand with Palestine”.
What explains the British political elite’s categorical support for Israel as it violates international law, kills thousands of civilians and is accused of “crimes against humanity” and preparing “a genocide in the making”? Two key reasons.
Special Relationship
Britain has enabled arms shipments to Israel by allowing the US military to use its Cyprus airbase, RAF Akrotiri. (Photo:Declassified U.K.)
The first is the need for Whitehall to demonstrate subservience to Washington and specifically its role as America’s key military ally.
The U.S. plies Israel with billions in military aid and acts as its chief global defender. Whitehall shapes its foreign policy largely around acting as the U.S. lieutenant – or lapdog. Going up against Washington over Israel would be seen in Whitehall as impossible while maintaining this relationship.
The U.S. has delivered dozens of cargo flights full of military equipment to Israel during its bombardment of Gaza. As we at Declassified have revealed, Britain has enabled much of this movement of arms by allowing the US military to use its vast air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri.
Former U.K. defence secretary Michael Portillo has said Labour leader Keir Starmer has done “exactly the right thing” to oppose a Gaza ceasefire “because the United States would want to know whether a Labour government was going to deviate from the alliance with the United States”.
That lack of deviation was on show when defence secretary Grant Shapps visited Washington in late October to meet his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin. A readout of the meeting said, “our two countries have led the response to prevent escalation in the Middle East, and support Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The U.K. needs to be seen as Washington’s most dependable ally. A week into Israel’s bombing campaign defence minister James Heappey visited the U.S. “to reaffirm the U.K.’s deep defence and security relationship with the U.S.”
The U.K.’s military relationship with the U.S. is “uniquely close”, he added, “and the sight of British and American aircraft landing on a British aircraft carrier stationed off America’s coastline is the perfect demonstration of the depth of that alliance.”
Nato also plays a key disciplining role at these times. Other European countries’ deference to the U.S. is likely the major reason they haven’t publicly supported the Palestinians in the face of Israel’s onslaught.
It is no surprise that it has been French president Emmanuel Macron – whose country is less enamoured with US military “leadership” than others in Europe – who has been the most prominent Western leader criticising (within limits) Israel’s bombing.
‘Keep Us in Line’
U.K. deference to Washington over Israel is shown in declassified files. In 1970, Percy Cradock, of Foreign and Commonwealth Office planning staff, wrote of “the need for association with the United States over Middle East issues”.
He added: “We cannot afford to distance ourselves too far from the United States position without risk of injury to the general Anglo-U.S. relationship”.
This was the case even though Cradock recognised that U.K. commercial interests – then as now – were much greater in the Arab world than in Israel.
Also in 1970, the Foreign Office Planning Committee put it in even stronger terms. It noted that the U.K. should not adopt an overtly pro-Arab position in the Arab-Israel conflict.
This was “because of the pressure which the United States government undoubtedly exert on HMG to keep us in line in any public pronouncements or negotiations on the dispute”.
The U.K. is a much weaker power in the Middle East than it was 50 years ago. For British planners, steeped in centuries of ruling the world by force and still determined to uphold their global power status at all costs, an obsequious dependency on Washington is now even more important.
The Israel Lobby
Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) paid for James Cleverly (above) and Suella Braverman – until recently the foreign and home secretaries – to Israel in August 2015. (Photo: Twitter)
The second reason is the Israel lobby, which is inordinately strong in the U.K., with both main political parties embedded in pro-Israel parliamentary groups.
Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) has claimed 80 percent of Conservative MPs are members. Declassified has found that the group has funded over a third of the current British cabinet.
OpenDemocracy previously revealed that CFI is the biggest donor of free overseas trips to MPs of any organisation.
CFI often takes MPs on paid-for trips to Israel early in their careers, to cultivate the British political establishment into a pro-Israel position. It paid, for example, £4000 ($3200) to take James Cleverly and Suella Braverman – until recently the foreign and home secretaries – to Israel in August 2015.
Cleverly said in a video during his 2015 trip that was posted by the CFI: “It’s been a real eye-opener. Israel is an amazing country, there’s no doubt about that.” He added: “Definitely recommend you come and visit.”
Cleverly has consistently backed Israel’s bombing of Gaza throughout its mass killing of civilians, including its collective punishment of Palestinians, involving halting water, electricity and food from going into the Gaza Strip.
Then there is Labour. Declassified has found that two-fifths of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet have been funded by pro-Israel lobbyists Labour Friends of Israel and pro-Israel funder Sir Trevor Chinn.
Labour Friends of Israel does not disclose its funders, even as over 75 Labour MPs and over 30 members of the House of Lords are members.
A 2017 undercover documentary by Al-Jazeera showed LFI is close to the Israeli embassy in London. In one piece of undercover footage taken at the Labour conference in 2016, then LFI chairperson and Labour MP Joan Ryan is seen talking to Shai Masot, an Israeli diplomat from the embassy. She asks him, “What happened with the names we put into the [Israeli] embassy, Shai?” Masot replies:
“Just now we’ve got the money, it’s more than one million pounds, it’s a lot of money.”
In another conversation, this time filmed outside a London pub, Michael Rubin, then parliamentary officer for LFI, admits that LFI and the Israeli embassy “work really closely together, but a lot of it is behind the scenes”.
He adds that “the [Israeli] embassy helps us quite a lot. When bad stories come out about Israel, the embassy sends us information so that we can counter it.”
The known extent of the Israel lobby’s funding of MPs dwarfs that of any other foreign power though funding from the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is also significant.
Russia’s influence in the U.K. appears small in comparison, which presumably explains why there have been parliamentary probes into Russia’s influence but not Israel’s.
Other Reasons
GCHQ’s ‘doughnut’ building in Cheltenham, west England. (U.K. Ministry of Defence, Wikimedia Commons)
There are other reasons in the mix as to why the U.K. elite is so strong in its backing of Israel at the expense of Palestinians.
Far from Israel being seen as a rogue state by the U.K., Whitehall sees it as a strategic partner. Israel is a significant buyer of U.K. arms, acquiring over £470m worth in the past eight years.
Israel also acts, at least sometimes, as a significant intelligence partner to Britain. For example, documents revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden show that Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, fed the Israelis selected communications data it collected in 2009, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza that left nearly 1400 people dead.
The U.K. military also gains from Israel by collaborating with it across all three military services. Military chiefs of the two states signed a cooperation agreement in 2020 “to formalise and enhance our defence relationship, and support the growing Israel-U.K. partnership”, according to the Israeli military.
What is in that agreement is secret and the U.K. government has refused to publish it.
But Israel lobby group Bicom (the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) has written that the two militaries are “integrating their multi-domain capabilities in maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic”.
Strategic asset?
Does Israel act as a strategic asset for the U.K. in the Middle East? Israel’s military regularly bombs official Western enemies such as Syria with no international repercussions at all. Maybe Israel will be the West’s attack dog for strikes on Iran, ostensibly to stop its nuclear programme.
The U.K. continues to help Israel internationally by pretending it doesn’t possess nuclear arms – weapons the U.K. helped Israel acquire from the 1950s onwards.
One of Britain’s long standing priorities in the Middle East has been to keep the Arab world divided so as to exercise control over it better.
British official T.E. Lawrence – so-called “Lawrence of Arabia” – wrote in an intelligence memo during the Arab revolt against the Turkish Ottoman empire in 1916 that the Arabs should be kept “in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion.”
In Arabia, Lawrence noted, the U.K. should create “a ring of client states” to keep the Muslim world divided. These concerns long outlasted the Arab revolt as Britain and the U.S. were confronted in the post-second war world with Arab nationalist movements – their principal threat to control of the oil-rich Middle East.
All U.K. governments say they support “stability” in the Middle East, but at the same time regularly go to war. Conflicts are by no means obstructive to the U.K. promoting its core aims.
In 2023, unlike in previous decades, none of Britain’s Arab allies are prepared to come to the aid of the Palestinians in Gaza, so the U.K. can back Israel in slaughtering them with little fear of reprisal.
One thing is clear. The Palestinians are no strategic asset to Whitehall. In contrast to Israel, they offer nothing to the British political elite. They are not geopolitical assets. They are simply human beings and therefore irrelevant to U.K. planners.
Mark Curtis is an author and editor of Declassified U.K., an investigative journalism organisation that covers Britain’s foreign, military and intelligence policies. He tweets at @markcurtis30. Follow Declassified on twitter at @declassifiedUK
This is an edited extract from Mark Curtis’ book, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Although Mark Curtis included above a short 1:06 min clip of UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly raving about his trip to Israel sponsored by the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), in my opinion it’s worth watching this longer 9:40 min video of Cleverly at the CFI's Conservative Party Conference Reception 2023 from October 6, 2023.In it he is essentially acting as a sales rep for CFI and their “complimentary” trips to Israel. No strings attached of course. 😉
The following opinion piece by Yara Hawari was published by Al Jazeera in June 2023.
Yara Hawari is the Palestine Policy Fellow of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi announced the creation of the Conservative Friends of Palestine (CFP) in May 2023 [Getty]
Last month, at an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in the British Parliament, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, formally announced the creation of the Conservative Friends of Palestine (CFP).
For half a century, CFI has been a formidable pro-Israel voice in the higher echelons of the British political establishment. A recent investigation revealed that it has paid for more MPs to go on overseas trips than any other lobby group. In 2014, CFI boasted that 80 percent of Conservative Party MPs were members of the group.
In light of CFI’s historic success, and continuing popularity among Conservative members of parliament, the founding of CFP is undoubtedly a surprising development.
Indeed, Warsi, who became Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister in 2010, has long been a rare – if not the only – prominent pro-Palestine voice in the Conservative Party.
In 2014, she resigned from David Cameron’s cabinet in protest to its response to the Israeli regime’s bombardment of Gaza, which saw more than 2,000 Palestinians killed. The government’s “approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible,” Warsi wrote in the resignation letter she shared on Twitter.
Warsi’s efforts to counter CFI’s influence over Conservative parliamentarians, however, is in no way an indication that British Conservatives are growing more supportive of Palestinian liberation.
After all, core Tory values and policies continue to be at odds with the goals of and motivations behind the Palestinian struggle. Warsi herself is only in a position to try and promote the Palestinian cause among Conservative representatives because she agreed to join the House of Lords – a body seen by many as antithetical to democracy and the epitome of elitist rule – as a life peer in 2007.
Furthermore, just six percent of Conservative MPs and members of the House of Lords, or some 35 people among 615, joined CFP since its founding – a very poor showing compared with the CFI, which counts over two-thirds of Conservative MPs among its members.
Indeed, those who support Palestine’s struggle for liberation generally tend to be on the left of the political spectrum. In the United Kingdom, trade unions, socialists and many other leftist spaces and grassroots organisations have long been standing in solidarity with Palestinians against Zionist settler colonialism.
As a Jacobin editorial stated a decade ago, support for Palestine is not an “idiosyncratic fetish divorced from the broader politics of the left. Rather… (it is) a focal point of anti-imperialist struggle, where peasants and slum-dwellers are now fighting a desperate struggle against tanks and F-16s…”
It is leftist values of anti-colonialism, and racial and social justice, among others, that are the driving force behind this kind of solidarity with Palestine.
In this context, it is difficult to see Warsi’s CFP as anything other than a gimmick and a personal project that is unlikely to change the party’s stance on Palestine in any meaningful way.
Yet, despite the values fuelling the Palestinian struggle perfectly aligning with the core values of left-wing political thought, the “leftist” establishment in the UK and its leading representatives in the Labour Party have been staunch supporters of the Israeli regime since its inception.
Former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, for example, was known for his “devotion to the cause of Israel” and somehow considered the Israeli regime a “wonderful experiment in socialist politics”. Labour’s support for the Zionist project was grounded in its support for liberal Zionism, which fused socialism and settler colonialism together. For the British establishment left, which to this day has not reckoned with its own colonial past, there was no contradiction in this fusion.
Since then, the British Labour Party has maintained a strong relationship with the Israeli regime and in particular its sister Israeli Labour Party – the very party that spearheaded the illegal settlement enterprise in the West Bank, Gaza, and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 1967. Today, the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) is a popular parliamentary group with support from the higher echelons of the Labour Party.
When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party he broke with tradition and disrupted the party’s unwavering support for the Israeli regime.
In addition to recentering socialist politics as the foundation for the party, he was also outspoken in his critique of the Israeli regime’s oppression of Palestinians. His decades-long support for and involvement in the Palestine solidarity movement was one of the main reasons he was eventually ousted from Labour leadership and eventually the party.
Today, as it continues to embrace neoliberalism and moves away from true leftist values under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the Labour Party is once again increasingly hostile to the Palestinian struggle. And it is not the only one – most leftist establishment political parties in the West are also hostile to Palestinian liberation. So much so that the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States has come up with a term to describe this: Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP).
Yet despite this betrayal by establishment politics, most grassroots leftists across the world insist on the inclusion of Palestine as part and parcel of leftist politics. For them, the Palestinians’ struggle against racial domination and aggressive settler colonial expansion is obviously legitimate and embodies the true meaning of internationalism.
With the right wing on the rise across Europe, some may be tempted to seek out allies in these spaces and support tactical alliances with rare pro-Palestine right-wingers like Warsi. Such cooperation attempts, however, would not only be morally questionable but also politically incoherent.
So, rather than looking for friendly outliers on the right, those interested in expanding Palestine solidarity should focus their efforts on rebuilding power and support on the left.
Supporting the Palestinian struggle is not to support a single, isolated issue. It is to support a radical and international political package that demands justice for all.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance
Whilst I’m at it, even if you have seen it in the past, I highly recommend watching Al Jazeera’s excellent undercover investigation film exposé The Lobby published in 2017, which reveals how the Israel lobby penetrates different levels of British “democracy” and influences British politics.
It is also stated in the videos that AIPAC works directly with British Young Friends of Israel.
Please watch the playlist for the four-part series by clicking on the image below.
I also highly recommend watching Al Jazeera’s 2022 series The Labour Files which begins with The Purge.
An investigation based on the largest leak of documents in British political history. The Labour Files examines thousands of internal documents, emails and social media messages to reveal how senior officials in one of the two parties of government in the UK ran a coup by stealth against the elected leader of the party.
The program will show how officials set about silencing, excluding and expelling its own members in a ruthless campaign to destroy the chances of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Britain’s prime minister. Candidates for key political roles were blocked and constituency groups suspended as the party’s central office sought to control the elected leadership.
Please click on the image below to watch the playlist for the three-part series.
May the new year bring peace and good tidings for you and your families. 🙏
