The wealthy Jewish lobby in Britain working under the title of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) has been tipped as the Conservative Party's paymaster.
The CFI as described by British political analysts is beyond doubt the most well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups. It works in support of the interests of the Israeli regime.
The CFI's finances may be legal but they are hardly transparent as the lobbying group is an unincorporated association. This is how the British media report about CFI's financial transactions.
The register of MPs' interests shows that CFI board members and their businesses gave the Conservatives over 2 million pounds in the last 8 years.
The reports also say more than 30,000 pound from CFI members went to campaign funds of the members of Prime Minister David Cameron's team when he was first elected as the party leader in2005.
Also in 2005, Cameron himself had received 15,000 pound from a pro-Israeli lobby facilitator. The facilitator had also donated 50,000 pounds to the Conservative Central Office.
“Donations from all CFI members and their businesses to the Conservative Party of Britain have topped over 10 million pounds over the past 8 years”, according to reliable sources inside the UK.
Here's an example of how the pro-Israeli lobby works in the UK.
After the 22-day Israeli war on the Gaza Strip a fact-finding team was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the war and identify the culprits.
A few weeks since the UN was to vote on a resolution following judge Goldstone's report who condemned Israel for abusing human rights in Gaza, the CFI ran up to now foreign secretary William Hague office and after consulting with David Cameron, he gave them this quote:
“Unless the draft resolution is redrafted to reflect the role that Hamas played in starting the conflict we would recommend that the British government vote to reject the resolution”.
But, it was under former Prime Minister Tony Blair that the Israel lobby first acquired real influence in government. Former chairman of the Labour friends of Israel John Mandelson boasted:
“Zionism is pervasive in new Labour, it's automatic that Blair will come to Labour friends of Israel's meetings”.
Shortly before Blair became Labour party leader in 1994 he met Michael Levy the pop music millionaire at a social event arranged by the Israeli embassy. They became friends, played tennis and Levy became Blair's fundraiser. It's estimated that he raised almost 15 million pounds for Labour before the row over cash for peerages.
When Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997, he awarded Michael Levy a life peerage and made him his special envoy to the Middle East, but because Levy was unpaid and working directly to the prime minister, what he negotiated between the Israeli entity and Arabs on behalf of Britain was kept secret.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is actively lobbying a number of world leaders to support Indonesia’s stance on climate change he promoted in the national statement read at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen on Thursday.
Presidential spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said the President had met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd soon after reading out the statement.
He is scheduled to meet with chairman of the ASEAN and Thai Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva later in the day as the climate conference is nearing its end.
“The core (of the talks) is to bridge the different interests between developed and developing countries to ensure a new consensus will be produced (at the climate summit),” Dino briefed reporters before the meeting with Abhisit.
On Wednesday night, Yudhoyono met with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg upon arrival in Copenhagen.
Prior to his Copenhagen stop, the President also met with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, during which they agreed to ensure the success of the climate change summit.
Dino added that Yudhoyono had also sent Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa to lobby Sudan, which chairs the G77 economic group.
“There are high mistrust and big different (interests)… Presently countries are intensively lobbying one another to create a new consensus. And this might lead to a prolonged conference,” Dino said.
Yudhoyono unveiled five points in his statements at the high-level segment of the climate change summit, which was attended by some 110 world leaders.
Among the points are that he urges developed countries to cut their emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and to provide bigger amount of funds to mitigate the climate change.
A new documentary on the UK’s Channel 4 television looks into the reach and influence of what the filmmakers say is Britain’s most powerful political interest: the Israel lobby.
Documentarians Peter Osborne and James Jones uncovered obscure funding patterns of British members of parliament by members of pro-Israel groups and also revealed the pressure the lobby exerts on the media. The show first aired on Monday evening.
In a pamphlet published on the website OpenDemocracy Osborne explained that the concept was born out of a marked silence in the British media when exploring the extent of Israel’s influence on Westminster, noting that, oftentimes, those who broche the subject or criticize Israel are accused of anti-Semitism.
“Whether as a result of these pressures or for some other reason, mainstream political publishing in Britain tends simply to ignore Israeli influence … However, many people just don’t want to speak out about the Israel lobby. So making our film at times felt like an impossible task.”
When approaching MPs and senior journalists, Osborne and Jones were met with reservation and fears, with few offering to speak on the record. One willing interviewee, Michael Mates, a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee and former Northern Ireland minister remarked that “the pro-Israel lobby in our body politic is the most powerful political lobby. There’s nothing to touch them,” adding, “I think their lobbying is done very discreetly, in very high places, which may be why it is so effective.”
First in funding
The exposé revealed that approximately half of the members of the shadow cabinet are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CIF), “probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups,” which has made a number of donations to conservative constituency offices, often through company names allowing the sums to appear relatively unconnected to the organization itself. The program further discovered that 80% of Conservative MPs are members of the CIF, adding that several candidates who won seats in the parliament had funds donated to them by the CIF.
The Labor Friends of Israel (LFI), "a Westminster based lobby group working within the British Labor Party to promote the State of Israel" fostered close ties with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who joined the society upon his premiership. Notably, his ties with Baron Michael Levy, a firm LFI supporter and formerly head fundraiser for a number of Jewish charities, led to the prime minister’s entanglement with the "cash for peerages" scandal in 2006, for which Levy was detained and questioned. Levy raised approximately 15 million British pounds for Blair until the scandal ended his fundraising career.
Britain’s most prominent Israel lobby, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the equivalent of the US AIPAC, has given over two million British Pounds in donations directly from the organization’s chairman, Finnish gambling tycoon Poju Zabludowicz, according to the program’s findings.
Most significantly, however, Zabludowicz’s father made his money through Israeli arms manufacturers Soltam Systems, a company that recently provided the Israeli army with artillery for Operation Cast Led in Gaza last winter. It was further discovered that Zabludowicz owns property in the illegal Jerusalem settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, where he has stakes in a shopping centre. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband recently described such settlements as “illegal” and “an obstacle to peace.”
Media war
The connection between BICOM and the Israeli army's artillery acquirement became ever more suspect when Osborn and Jones probed the lobby's sway over British media, and in particular, over the BBC's decision not to broadcast an advertisement appealing for funds for Gaza by Disasters Emergency Committee.
While the investigation could not find conclusive evidence to support any lobby's interference in the matter, their interview with the BBC's Charlie Becket revealed that "If there was no pro-Israel lobby in this country then I don't think [screening the appeal] would have been politically problematic. I don't think it would be a serious political issue and concern for them if they didn't have that pressure from an extraordinarily active, sophisticated, and persuasive lobby sticking up for the Israeli viewpoint."
BICOM has further sponsored expense-paid trips for journalists to Israel, Osborne and Jones noting that the organization sent six journalists to Gaza two months after Operation Cast Led to meet with the Israeli Defense Minister and to conclude that "more attention be paid to Iran than the Palestinians."
The Israel lobbies have also been instrumental in ensuring that journalists who criticize Israel "who have been subject to ceaseless pressure and at times harassment from the Israeli government and pressure groups," citing the examples of The Guardian's Suzanne Goldberg whose line of reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict led to her transfer to Washington, and Chris McGreal who fell victim to a smear campaign after he published an article likening Israel to an apartheid South Africa.
Additionally, the BBC's Jeremy Bowen faced "powerful attacks" after he published an online article marking the 40th anniversary of the Arab-Israel War. Two members from respective pressure groups The Zionist Federation and CAMERA launched a campaign accusing Bowen of accuracy and impartiality breaches and calling for his resignation. Bowen had published a similar article, including the contested lines, a few months before in the Jewish Chronicle which met with no complaint or opposition.
So what do Osborne and Jones make of their findings? Both asserted that all donations accepted by MPs are “entirely legal,” but “emphatically not transparent,” concluding that “Israel … has a profound right to exist. But this moral legitimacy does not mean that the foreign and internal policies of Israel should be exempt from the same kind of probing criticism that any independent state must expect. Nor does it mean that the rights of Palestinians to their own state can be ignored.”
The program does not suggested that a curb be placed on the lobbies' influence in parliament, all the while referring to probable contraventions to guidelines set out by the British the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The revelations appear timidly alarming, refraining from accusations of anything more than financial support that lack transparency. While refreshing and informative, one can't help but feel that perhaps the pressure that has caused many to shy away from the issue of Israel's influence on Westminster- the very instigator for the program - has limited Osborne from probing further into the possible far-reaching effects the lobbies have on British foreign policy.
Dispatches: Inside Britain's Israel Lobby was broadcast on Channel on Monday and will be shown again on Friday.
The journalist, Peter Oborne, could not believe his ears when, last summer, in the aftermath of Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza, the leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, praised Israel for striving to “protect innocent lives”. Cameron was addressing the annual dinner of Conservative Friends of Israel, the pro-Israel group in his party. Last week, in a groundbreaking Dispatches documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 television, trailed by an article in the Guardian newspaper, Oborne investigated the covert influence of Britain’s “Israel lobby”.
During the last two decades, the Labour Party, which has ruled Britain since 1997, has been hugely susceptible to Zionist influence. Soon after becoming an MP in 1983, Tony Blair (right) joined Labour Friends of Israel, acutely aware of the career benefits of so doing. His elevation to the leadership of the party and subsequent election as British prime minister in 1997 owed much to the extraordinary fund-raising endeavors on behalf of Blair and “New Labour” by the Jewish pop music tycoon, Lord Michael Levy.
It was Blair’s ambition to free the Labour Party from its traditional dependency on the trade unions. That he was liberating the party from the unions and rendering it beholden instead to donors with pugnaciously pro-Israel agendas did not bother him. For all his professed commitment to justice for the Palestinians, Blair has never uttered a word that could offend Zionist opinion. And yet Britain could soon have a government still more beholden to the Israel lobby than Blair and New Labour. Oborne believes that at least half of the Cameron’s shadow Cabinet are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. That Israel can expect unconditional support from a Cameron government is plain. Witness the refusal of shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, a politician not always loath to criticize Israel, to endorse the UN Goldstone Report alleging that Israel perpetrated war crimes and crime against humanity in Gaza, not to mention his party’s agreement never to apply the term “disproportionate” to Israeli military action.
OBORNE’S case is that clandestine funding of British political parties by Zionists ought to be anathema in a political culture, which upholds transparency and democratic accountability. It is no less repugnant, he maintains, that those parts of the British media, notably the BBC and The Guardian, that seek to present a balanced picture of the Middle East conflict, should be ceaselessly vilified by the Zionist lobby. Not that “hostile” coverage of Israel has curbed Zionist influence in the highest reaches of the British political establishment. Since 1997, Oborne observes, British foreign policy has been conducted as though British interests were identical to those of Israel and the United States. It seems incredible now that in 1981 Britain’s then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could have condemned Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant, Osirak, as a “grave breach of international law”.
The most remarkable thing about Oborne’s expose was that it was broadcast at all. Not long ago, for a journalist to speak out against the Israel lobby was tantamount to committing professional suicide. When, in the mid-1970s, the sometime Guardian Middle East correspondent, Michael Adams, coauthored the pioneering book, “Publish It Not”, on the behind-the-scenes lobbying of groups like Labour Friends of Israel, he consigned himself to journalistic oblivion. The same fate is unlikely to await the ebullient Oborne. Though now assured of a special place in Zionist demonology, he has been able to start a necessary debate about the subversion of the democratic process in Britain on behalf of a foreign power. The Guardian’s online “Comment is Free” forum is this week in uproar. The truth is that there is more scope for public candor on the subject of Israel than ever before. The publication in 2005 of the American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book “The Israel Lobby”, about Zionist influence over US policy-making, was an epoch-making event. The radical Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s new book, “The Invention of the Jewish People”, is of similarly cardinal significance. These works — like Oborne’s documentary (which has been accompanied by a trenchant pamphlet) — testify to a sea change in the climate of Western intellectual, as well as general public opinion, vis-à-vis the boundaries of debate about the Jewish state.
SAND’S book challenges what he regards as the myth of the historic mass expulsion of the Jews from Palestine: The bulk of the Jewish diaspora, he contends, consisted not of genetic heirs of Palestinian Jews but of converts. However, the book is also illuminating in relation to the power of the Israel lobby. Sand writes that Israel’s strength now depends less on demographic increase than precisely on cultivating the loyalty of overseas Jewish organizations and communities. It would be a serious setback for Israel, he remarks, if all the Zionist lobbies were to immigrate into the “Holy Land”. It is much more useful for them to remain close to the centers of Western power.
Arguing that there is no such thing as a pure nation state, Sand maintains that the notion of Jews as a unique people with a special destiny is a self-serving fantasy. Israel’s problem is that at a time when Western democracies have embraced multiethnic national identities, defining themselves in inclusive terms as states of all their citizens, it insists on being a racially exclusive polity. In other words, the Israel lobby is trying to proclaim the Jewish state’s democratic credentials to Western publics for whom Israel’s constitutional essence has become a bizarre anachronism, a relic of outmoded attitudes. Sand fears that Israel’s regressiveness, its failure fully to enfranchise even the many Arabs who live in Israel itself, is inviting the kind of cataclysmic ethnic conflict that has raged in former Yugoslavia. “The Invention of the Jewish People” has just been published in English. This brilliant polemic is an eye-opening piece of historical deconstruction and a major contribution to the debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict.
