Tony Greenstein

Jonathan Rosenhead

Many readers of the Newsletter
will already be aware of the ground-breaking Al-Jazeera English series The
Lobby, broadcast on 4 consecutive nights from January 11th. Some will not – and
in this they will be in the good company of the vast majority of the UK’s
population. It got a front-page splash in the Daily Mail (of all places), but
this was not followed up by the sort of in depth coverage elsewhere that its
explosive contents deserved.

However that silence is not the
one this article’s title refers to. This silence is analogous in its essentials
to that of the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The crux of
the plot is the disappearance one night of a famous race horse, and the violent
death of his trainer. The dog slept in the stables where this happened. The
celebrated dialogue runs like this:

Gregory (Scotland Yard
detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my
attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious
incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing
in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the
curious incident.”

The dog that signally failed to
bark, not for one night, or over the last month, but for year after year is the
entire British mainstream media – print, radio, television. What is the story
that they missed and why did they miss it?

The set up

The Lobby is still viewable at  and if you haven’t seen it you should.
It makes gripping viewing.

The programmes depend on
‘Robin’, whose face we never see. He created a cover story as an aspiring
Labour party activist with strong Israeli sympathies, and for 6 months managed to penetrate the shadowy
world where Israeli embassy officials set up sham organisations to support
Israel, mingle with very willing activists (both Labour and Conservative) and
make funds available to them. And all the while Robin wears a concealed camera.

We have known
about ‘The Israel Lobby’ in the US, and its most notable unit AIPAC, for years.
Mearsheimer and Walt wrote a celebrated book with that title. The Lobby however
is about the UK’s own Israel Lobby. To UK activists its existence has been
known, in principle, for years. There has been circumstantial evidence galore –
the inside track which Israel so evidently makes use of, the lavish funding of
pro-Israel organisations, the sabotage of pro-Palestinian events. So we ‘knew’.
But now we really know.

It is worth
pointing up here the reason why the activity revealed in The Lobby is taking
place at all – the growing world-wide success of the Boycott Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement. This is now seen by Israel as the principal strategic
threat to its continuing domination over the Palestinian people. The frenetic
and multi-headed activity of Israel’s friends, supporters and proxies revealed
in these programmes is, paradoxically, a measure of BDS’s success. Israel can
no longer afford to rely just on discreet words in sympathetic ears; it is
mobilising on many levels. In the process, they run a greater risk of their
slips showing.

For supporters
of academic boycott, such as BRICUP, and of BDS as a whole, the revelations of
The Lobby are both an education, and a motivator.

The plot

There is so
much material in these programmes that I can only be selective. But I’ll give a
fairly detailed rundown of what is in the first programme, and then get more
selective.

In Episode 1
we see Robin swanning around in the milieu of Labour Friends of Israel, the
Israel Britain Alliance (a Zionist Federation Project), BICOM, Sussex Friends
of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement. He is under the wing of Shai Masot of the
Israeli Embassy, an unimpressive but gregarious character, anxious to be
popular. He is quite deeply embedded – claiming for example to know all 200
London-based members of the Young Fabians. And in fact he did organise a trip
to Israel for the Young Fabians in 2015. As Masot says in conversation:
“Delegation to Israel – always a good start”.

The
revelations come thick and fast. We meet a couple of NUS Vice-Presidents plotting
against their President Malia Bouattia, who supports Palestine. (The Chair of
Labour Students is in on the plot.) One of them, not I think Jewish, had been
taken on an expenses-paid Union of Jewish Students trip to Israel. The Israeli
Embassy actually funds UJS itself! A University College London pro-Israel
student activist has set up the Pinsker Centre which channels funds from AIPAC
to appropriate causes.

We eavesdrop
on the summer barbecue of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). We meet Ella Rose,
who has been President of UJS, and has just been appointed Director of JLM. As
she herself says, her CV didn’t have the most Labour Party experience among the
candidates. But hey, what does that matter if you are applying from a staff
position within the Israeli Embassy? (Later, unknowingly on camera, Rose boasts
that with her martial arts training – from Israel – she could easily ‘take’
anti-racist campaigner Jackie Walker.)

And then Masot
invites Robin to chair the Young Labour Friends of Israel. It doesn’t exist –
Robin’s job is to set it up. He is invited to apply for a job at the Embassy,
first by Masot and then by its Head of Civil Affairs, who says his job would be
to research the UK’s BDS movement.

What we get is
a picture of a heady swirling mix of right-wing politics, ambition, wads of
Israeli and US money, fake and shadow organisations, and over-weening
self-confidence. Stirring the mix is an Israeli diplomat who isn’t even a
diplomat.

Later
episodes

We are really
spoilt for choice. Episode 2 shows the famous JLM training session (on
antisemitism!) at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. This was the
session at which Jackie Walker was set up, and secretly filmed so that an
edited version of her interventions could present her in a bad light. It worked
– she was ousted as vice-Chair of Momentum and suspended from Labour Party
membership.

Shai Masot is
on the scene at the conference, sometimes in convoy with Regev, or sitting
hugger-mugger with him and the Chair of JLM Jeremy Newmark at a private meeting
with pro-Israel supporters. (Regev says that people on the 3 left are very
opposed to Israel “and probably antisemitic”.)

We share the
delight of Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, when Masot tells
her he has more than £1 million from Israel needed to fund trips to Israel by
influential Labour MPs. We share her fury when a conference delegate
persistently asks her how a 2-state solution can work – persistently because
her interlocuter is dissatisfied with the non-answers she is getting. Ryan then
persuades herself that the questioner has indulged in an antisemitic trope
(about Jews working for banks – which we can see is Ryan’s own subconscious
interpolation of material that wasn’t said). Ryan makes a complaint; the
delegate is suspended from party membership.

Of course it
isn’t only happening in and around the Labour Party. Masot seems to be best
buddies with Maria Strizzolo, the young chief of staff to MP Robert Halfon, a
Minister in the Government, and deputy chair of the Conservative Party at the
time the recording happened. Simultaneously she is also a Westminster-based
civil servant. Their highly indiscreet conversation is recorded as ever by
Robin’s attentive camera. They talk about setting up a ‘City Friends of Israel’
for young finance professionals, with AIPAC’s assistance.

The crunch
point, politically, is when she and Masot discuss the possibility of ‘taking
down’ some non-compliant Tory MPs. As Strizzolo says “If you look hard enough,
I’m sure there is something that they are trying to hide”. The one name that
they put in the frame for this treatment is Sir Alan Duncan – certainly well
known for showing more sympathy for the Palestinian predicament than most of
his colleagues. But he was, and is, Deputy Foreign Minister! This small
indiscretion has lost Maria Strizzolo both her jobs, and got Masot sent back to
Israel in disgrace. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee is now investigating
“How UK policy is influenced by other states and interested parties”.

Strategic
Affairs

So that’s all
right then? Well, not really. This is the tip of a rather large iceberg. Craig
Murray has ferreted out of a reluctant Foreign Office the fact that Masot was
supposed to be a member of the embassy’s ‘technical and administrative staff’,
a grade well below the diplomatic salt. But as we see in the series, Masot is
Ambassador Regev’s chosen travelling companion to the Labour Party conference –
not really a technical and administrative duty. Evidently this is not all above
board.

In fact Murray has examined the
register of Israeli Embassy employees, and believes he has discovered what he
calls ‘a large nest of Israeli spies’. It is, he says, “simply impossible” that
the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to
support sixteen diplomats, when six of those sixteen are already support staff.
So it seems that we have quite a bunch of supernumerary staff at the Embassy,
up to something, and connived at by the UK government.

There is certainly some
circumstantial evidence for this reading in Masot’s own biography, in so far as
it is known. Until quite recently he was a major in the IDF. London was his
first ‘diplomatic’ assignment, it was temporary, and he was not a regular
member of the diplomatic service. The very credible suggestion has been made
that his placement in London was the responsibility not of Israel’s Foreign
Ministry but of its Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The MSA was set up in 2010
to counter Israel’s perceived ‘strategic threats’, principally the
international BDS campaign. In the last year or two it has been on a spending spree for new ‘talent’, quite affordable from its $50
million budget. The new employees are “mostly former officers from Israel’s intelligence
community”. All this fits Masot’s profile rather well. And then there is the
fact that when the Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan visited London
last September, Masot was among
the Israeli officials he met.

No wonder, then, that Israel
removed Masot from the UK at something approaching the speed of light, and that
the FCO in an unseemly rush pronounced the matter satisfactorily closed. We
must hope that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee will not so easily be
deflected from its task.

The second scandal

In fact the fiasco of Masot’s
incompetent machinations is only one, and perhaps the lesser, of two scandals.
The other scandal is how this can have been going on, evidently for years, yet
no British news organisation with the resources to do so thought it worth
investigating. Why do we have to rely on Al-Jazeera to cleanse our stable? It
is that overwhelming silence that shouts complicity.

There is one honourable
exception to this charge sheet. In 2009 the respected right-wing journalist
Peter Oborne made a television programme Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby for the
Dispatches series. He concentrated then on the Conservative Friends 4 of Israel (barely touched on in The
Lobby), which the programme makers describe as “beyond doubt the most
well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying
groups”. (The full text is available on line.)

Oborne is interviewed for
comment on the Al-Jazeera programme, and is almost incandescent with
indignation about the revelations of Israeli interference with UK political
processes. But some of that rage should surely be diverted and redirected at
our own media. In the USA the operations of big oil and the gun lobby in
distorting the political agenda are well known and visible. This relative
transparency doesn’t just happen – it needs an alert, vigilant media with the
courage and freedom of its convictions.

The British media is a watch
dog that hasn’t barked. It is as appropriate to ask why that is so, and perhaps
more useful, than to fulminate about the iniquity of Israel’s ruthless pursuit
of what it perceives to be its interests. Are the watchdog’s teeth rotten
beyond repair? Is it muzzled? What are the mechanisms that have maintained this
complaisant silence in the presence of a blatant affront to open democracy?

Postscript