Israel interfering with democracy

By John Moore

Russia is routinely accused of interfering in elections in the West. The Russiagate smears were an important element of Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump in 2016. No hard evidence was offered, but the word of “the US intelligence community” was deemed sufficient. Similar charges against Russia were wheeled out by Democrat supporters and media during this year’s US Presidential election campaign.

PRO-ISRAEL INTERFERENCE

Meanwhile, Israel is interfering in Western elections blatantly and with clear proof. One example: in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other lobbying committees spent $25 million on ads to defeat progressive pro-Palestine Democrat candidates Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri this summer, according to Politico. As a result, two mainstream Democrats replaced them as candidates. (1) A Reject AIPAC campaign has begun, headed by progressive groups as well as organisations focused on Palestinian rights, including the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Meanwhile, in Britain scrutiny of Israeli influence is non-existent in the mainstream media, which makes the work of Declassified and other investigative journalists all the more important. Declassified has done particularly useful work in highlighting Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) which describes itself as “a Westminster based lobby group working within the British Labour Party to promote the State of Israel”. While LFI does not disclose its funders, it is known to have close links to the Israeli embassy in London. Some years ago, LFI’s parliamentary officer, Michael Rubin, was secretly filmed by Al Jazeera for its documentary, The Lobby, admitting that LFI and the embassy “work really closely together, but a lot of it is behind the scenes”. (2)

According to Defend Democracy Press, “37% of Labour MPs are associated with LFI, with an additional 37 members of the House of Lords. The current and all seven recent shadow foreign secretaries have been members of LFI or financially supported by the pro-Israel lobby”. (3) Seven members of Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet have gone on LFI-funded trips to Israel, and Health Minister Wes Streeting meets regularly with LFI at Westminster. Senior Labour ministers Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden, Jonathan Reynolds – the trade secretary who oversees arms exports to Israel – and technology secretary Peter Kyle, are all vice-chairs of LFI and funded by it. Other pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to 13 of Labour’s 25 cabinet ministers, according to Declassified. They include Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper – as well as Reeves, Reynolds and McFadden.

And it’s not just politicians, it’s also their advisers. Another pro-Israeli lobby group called the European Leadership Network has paid for Streeting and Bridget Phillipson’s parliamentary staff to visit Israel. One of them told openDemocracy, “There was a clear and obvious agenda to make sure people had a pro-Israel stance going into government”. (4) Demonstrating the direct involvement of the Israeli state, the Israeli embassy asked one of the participants, “Did you enjoy the trip we sent you on?”

These pro-Israel organisations are part of a network. The European Leadership Network’s funders include the American billionaire Bernie Marcus, who also donates to AIPAC.

Trevor Chinn, a big donor to Cabinet ministers, is a British oligarch who has funded both Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel since the 1980s. Chinn gave £50,000 towards Starmer’s party leadership campaign in 2020. His father, Rosser Chinn, was the president of the Jewish National Fund in Britain, “a quasi-governmental organisation that has supported illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine and was described by historian Ilan Pappé as a ‘colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing’’. As Declassified explains, “Another pro-Israel tycoon, former hedge fund manager Stuart Roden, has donated over £1m to Labour since 2023, with £80,000 supporting the office costs of Phillipson and Nandy,”.

POLITICAL PRESSURE

Other pressure groups in Britain include the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which lobbies “unashamedly for Israel”, according to recent Board president Jonathan Arkush, and boasts that it enjoys a “close working relationship” with the Embassy of Israel. Though it claims to represent Britain’s Jewish community, many of the strictly orthodox Jewish communities, which make up a large and fast-growing percentage of British Jews, neither recognise the Board nor support Israel. The same goes for the tens of thousands of non-religious, progressive British Jews, many of whom are anti-Zionist. Meanwhile, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis – who also represents only a fraction of Jewish people in Britain – strongly condemned the government’s partial ban on exporting weapons to Israel, as did LFI.

Another recent pro-Israel offensive was launched by UK Lawyers for Israel – the group that ensured that an art display by Palestinian children was removed from a hospital. It mounted a legal challenge to the government’s partial suspension of weapons exports to Israel, on the grounds that the ban cited Israeli denial of aid to Gaza and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, neither of which crimes require or make use of the exported arms components that David Lammy suspended.

The pro-Israel lobby has also targeted individuals. The British Israel Research and Communications Centre (BICOM) – described as “one of the most persistent and slickest media operations in the battle for influence over opinion formers” (5) – attempted to remove the rapper Lowkey’s music from Spotify, through its advocacy arm We Believe in Israel, whose director is Luke Akehurst MP. We Believe in Israel aimed to prevent Lowkey from airing his “extreme anti-Israel” views against genocide in Palestine. The group also targeted Sally Rooney for complying with the BDS campaign in refusing to allow an Israeli publisher to translate her recent novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, into Hebrew. (6)

UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY

Combined with state harassment of prominent pro-Palestine activists such as journalists Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson, the pro-Israel lobby in Britain is a powerful and dangerous anti-democratic force. In aggressively shrinking the space for progressive campaigning – by menacing British individuals and organisations – and in pressing members of the government and other politicians to promote the interests of a foreign power, the pro-Israel lobby attacks not only freedom of speech, but also undermines British sovereignty.

It was to combat the use of “weaponised” information by foreign powers that the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme was introduced – clearly aimed at Russia and China rather than Israel. But UK politicians who allow themselves to be used by the pro-Israel lobby and act as mouthpieces for the Israeli narrative of events may fall foul of the Scheme, whose related National Security Bill introduces a new offence against “state-sponsored disinformation” from abroad. (7) Propaganda, vilification and censorship campaigns emanating from the Israeli embassy and broadcast through British politicians and organisations clearly invite closer scrutiny.

Lowkey protests outside Israeli embassy photo by Alisdare Hickson