Leading news & media organisation uncovering the UK’s global footprint

Israel lobby funded a third of Conservative MPs
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/israel-lobby-funded-a-third-of-conservative-mps

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/israellobby.jpg

Exclusive: Tory politicians have accepted over £430,000 from Israel lobby groups and made 187 trips to the country.

#corruption

UK military support for Israel’s genocide was pre-planned
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-military-support-for-israels-genocide-was-pre-planned

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ukisrael.jpg

Since the onslaught began, the Royal Air Force has flown dozens of spy missions over Gaza and at least six Israeli military personnel have received training in the UK.

Nine Israeli military planes have visited Israel, with the British government refusing to say what is on board. Declassified has also found that the US military has been supplying weapons to Israel using the UK’s base on Cyprus.

None of this has troubled the UK national media. But all of it is consistent with the pledges contained in the Roadmap.

This month, the RAF even flew to Israel’s defence by shooting down drones from Iran – which were launched in retaliation for Israel’s illegal attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria.

In a separate section on Iran, the Roadmap states that “we work closely to counter the current threat from Iran” and that “we will seek to counter Iran’s destabilising regional activity”.

“We will work to ensure Iran never has nuclear weapon capabilities”, adds the accord between the two nuclear weapons powers.
Protecting Israel globally

The 2023 Roadmap goes way beyond a previous memorandum of understanding between the UK and Israel signed in 2021.

It explicitly states the two countries are “natural allies” – ignoring Israel’s pariah status among much of the rest of the world due its illegal occupation of the West Bank and “apartheid” system discriminating against Palestinians.

Notably, the Roadmap has a section entitled “Antisemitism, delegitimisation, and anti-Israel bias” whose wording directly prophesies Britain’s extraordinary apologias for Israel’s Gaza atrocities in international fora.

It calls for “tackling the disproportionate focus on Israel in the UN and other international bodies, including attempts to delegitimise it or deny its right to self-defence. All states have a duty to comply with their obligations under international law, but scrutiny must be measured, impartial and proportionate.”

Since Israel’s attacks, British ministers have thoroughly put this into practice. They have consistently apologised for Israel’s atrocities in the name of “self-defence” and have repeatedly point blank refused to condemn Israel’s violations of international law.

UK refuses to say if Israel bombed British doctors with UK-supplied weaponry
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-refuses-to-say-if-israel-bombed-british-doctors-with-uk-supplied-

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/israeljohn.jpg

UK refuses to say if Israeli bomber planes are using its Cyprus base
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-refuses-to-say-if-israeli-bomber-planes-are-using-its-cyprus-base

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/israelijets.jpg

After anonymous British officials reveal Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza have had access to Britain’s sprawling air base on nearby Cyprus, the UK military refuses to deny the visits, raising further suspicions about complicity in war crimes.

#génocidaires

Two-fifths of Keir Starmer’s cabinet have been funded by pro-Israel lobbyists [2 novembre 2023]
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/two-fifths-of-keir-starmers-cabinet-have-been-funded-by-pro-israel-l

Some 13 of the 31 members of Labour’s shadow cabinet have received donations from a prominent pro-Israel lobby group or individual funder, it can be revealed.

The list of recipients includes party leader Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, and even the former vice-chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, Lisa Nandy, who is now shadow international development minister.

These donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region, and Sir Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon and long-time pro-Israel lobbyist.

More than half of Starmer’s shadow cabinet are listed as parliamentary supporters or officers of LFI.

The group was established in 1957 to “act as a bridge linking [Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion’s party] Mapai… with the Labour Movement in Great Britain”.

It has since described itself as “a Westminster based lobby group working within the British Labour Party to promote the State of Israel”.

Britain has flown 50 spy missions over Gaza in support of Israel
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/britain-has-flown-50-spy-missions-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/surveillance.jpg

The UK military refuses to tell Declassified what intelligence it is sharing with Israel as we reveal the extraordinary number of surveillance flights Britain is undertaking over Gaza from its base on Cyprus.

#royaume_uni
#Complicité
#génocide

The UK government covertly plotted to discredit John Pilger
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-uk-government-covertly-plotted-to-discredit-john-pilger

Recently declassified files show how the UK government covertly monitored Australian journalist John Pilger, and sought to discredit him by encouraging media contacts to attack him in the press.

‘Incirlik is yours’: How Turkey’s Erdoğan handed major military base to the Americans
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/incirlik-is-yours-how-turkeys-erdogan-handed-major-military-base-to-

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/incirilik.jpg

The US and UK militaries refuse to tell Declassified if a US Air Force flight from Turkey to the UK’s Cyprus base was carrying weapons for Israel, as leaked American cables shed new light on Incirlik’s use by the US military.

خط « مباشر » بين بيروت وتل أبيب : أنظمة تشويش على اتصالات المقاومة؟
▻https://al-akhbar.com/Politics/373294

Depuis des jours, défilé incessant d’avions militaires de pays de l’Otan en particulier qui se posent au Liban (AIB et la base des forces aériennes libanaises (!) à Hamat). Certains font la navette entre Tel Aviv et Beyrouth (avec un crochet symbolique par Chypre). Il pourrait s’agir de matériel de brouillage. Destiné au conflit prochain contre le Hezbollat ?

يتواصل الغموض المحيط بالنشاط المكثّف والمتزايد، للطائرات العسكريّة الأجنبيّة التي تقوم برحلات بين مطار بيروت وقاعدة حامات الجوية التابعة للجيش اللبناني، وبين قواعد عسكرية في المنطقة، من بينها مطار تل أبيب في الكيان المحتل، ما يثير أسئلة حول الأهداف من وراء هذه الرحلات، وطبيعة حمولات هذه الطائرات، ووجهتها النهائية، وما إذا كانت تتضمّن معدات عسكرية أو مساعدات. وسُجّل خلال أسبوع، بين 14 الجاري و20 منه، هبوط تسع طائرات «أطلسية» في مطارَي بيروت وحامات.وقالت مصادر لـ«الأخبار» إن حمولة بعض الطائرات تتضمّن أجهزة تُستخدم للتشويش، ما يثير استفسارات حول سبب نقلها إلى لبنان، وما إذا كانت مما يُستخدم للتشويش على شبكة اتصالات المقاومة في حال تدحرجِ الحرب المشتعلة جنوباً إلى حرب واسعة. وذكّرت المصادر بالدور الكبير لسلاح الإشارة التابع للمقاومة في مواجهة العدوان الإسرائيلي في تموز 2006، وهو ما أدّى لاحقاً إلى الضغط على حكومة الرئيس فؤاد السنيورة، لاتخاذ القرار الشهير في 5 أيار 2008 بنزع شبكة اتصالات المقاومة.

Lawless in Gaza: Why Britain and the West back Israel’s crimes
▻https://www.declassifieduk.org/lawless-in-gaza-why-britain-and-the-west-back-israels-crimes

https://www.declassifieduk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/gazacook-1.jpg

As Western politicians line up to cheer on Israel as it starves Gaza’s civilians and plunges them into darkness to soften them up before the coming Israeli ground invasion, it is important to understand how we reached this point – and what it portends for the future.
JONATHAN COOK
13 October 2023

More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage. It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international power politics.

The first benefit for Israel, and its Western allies, is more discussed than the second.

The tiny strip of land hugging the eastern Mediterranean coast was turned into a mix of testing ground and shop window.

Israel could use Gaza to develop all sorts of new technologies and strategies associated with the homeland security industries burgeoning across the West, as officials there grew increasingly worried about domestic unrest, sometimes referred to as populism.

The siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, imposed by Israel in 2007 following the election of Hamas to rule the enclave, allowed for all sorts of experiments.

How could the population best be contained? What restrictions could be placed on their diet and lifestyle? How were networks of informers and collaborators to be recruited from afar? What effect did the population’s entrapment and repeated bombardment have on social and political relations?

And ultimately how were Gaza’s inhabitants to be kept subjugated and an uprising prevented?

The answers to those questions were made available to Western allies through Israel’s shopping portal. Items available included interception rocket systems, electronic sensors, surveillance systems, drones, facial recognition, automated gun towers, and much more. All tested in real-life situations in Gaza.

Israel’s standing took a severe dent from the fact that Palestinians managed to bypass this infrastructure of confinement last weekend – at least for a few days – with a rusty bulldozer, some hang-gliders and a sense of nothing-to-lose.

Which is part of the reason why Israel now needs to go back into Gaza with ground troops to show it still has the means to keep the Palestinians crushed.

Which brings us to the second purpose served by Gaza.

As Western states have grown increasingly unnerved by signs of popular unrest at home, they have started to think more carefully about how to sidestep the restrictions placed on them by international law.

The term refers to a body of laws that were formalised in the aftermath of the second world war, when both sides treated civilians on the other side of the battle lines as little more than pawns on a chessboard.

The aim of those drafting international law was to make it unconscionable for there to be a repeat of Nazi atrocities in Europe, as well as other crimes such as Britain’s fire bombing of German cities like Dresden or the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found”

One of the fundamentals of international law – at the heart of the Geneva Conventions – is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.

Very obviously, Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found. Even in “quiet” times, its inhabitants – one million of them children – are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care because medicines and equipment cannot be brought in; access to drinkable water; and the use of electricity for much of the day because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.

Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.

What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.

And yet no one in the so-called international community seems to have noticed.

But the trickiest legal situation – for Israel and the West – is when Israel bombs Gaza, as it is doing now, or sends in soldiers, as it soon will do.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the problem when he told the people of Gaza: “Leave now”. But, as he and Western leaders know, Gaza’s inhabitants have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape the bombs. So any Israeli attack is, by definition, on the civilian population too. It is the modern equivalent of the Dresden fire bombings.

Israel has been working on strategies to overcome this difficulty since its first major bombardment of Gaza in late 2008, after the siege was introduced.

A unit in its attorney general’s office was charged with finding ways to rewrite the rules of war in Israel’s favour.

At the time, the unit was concerned that Israel would be criticised for blowing up a police graduation ceremony in Gaza, killing many young cadets. Police are civilians in international law, not soldiers, and therefore not a legitimate target. Israeli lawyers were also worried that Israel had destroyed government offices, the infrastructure of Gaza’s civilian administration.

Israel’s concerns seem quaint now – a sign of how far it has already shifted the dial on international law. For some time, anyone connected with Hamas, however tangentially, is considered a legitimate target, not just by Israel but by every Western government.

“If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it”

Western officials have joined Israel in treating Hamas as simply a terrorist organisation, ignoring that it is also a government with people doing humdrum tasks like making sure bins are collected and schools kept open.

Or as Orna Ben-Naftali, a law faculty dean, told the Haaretz newspaper back in 2009: “A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head.”

Back at that time, David Reisner, who had previously headed the unit, explained Israel’s philosophy to Haaretz: “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law. If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it.

“The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”

Israel’s meddling to change international law goes back many decades.

Referring to Israel’s attack on Iraq’s fledgling nuclear reactor in 1981, an act of war condemned by the UN Security Council, Reisner said: “The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defence. International law progresses through violations.”

He added that his team had travelled to the US four times in 2001 to persuade US officials of Israel’s ever-more flexible interpretation of international law towards subjugating Palestinians.

“Had it not been for those four planes [journeys to the US], I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale,” he said.

Those redefinitions of the rules of war proved invaluable when the US chose to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

In recent years, Israel has continued to “evolve” international law. It has introduced the concept of “prior warning” – sometimes giving a few minutes’ notice of a building or neighbourhood’s destruction. Vulnerable civilians still in the area, like the elderly, children and the disabled, are then recast as legitimate targets for failing to leave in time.

And it is using the current assault on Gaza to change the rules still further.

The 2009 Haaretz article includes references by law officials to Yoav Gallant, who was then the military commander in charge of Gaza. He was described as a “wild man”, a “cowboy” with no time for legal niceties.

Gallant is now defence minister and the man responsible for instituting this week a “complete siege” of Gaza: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.” In language that blurred any distinction between Hamas and Gaza’s civilians, he described Palestinians as “human animals”.

That takes collective punishment into a whole different realm. In terms of international law, it skirts into the territory of genocide, both rhetorically and substantively.

But the dial has shifted so completely that even centrist Western politicians are cheering Israel on – often not even calling for “restraint” or “proportionality”, the weasel terms they usually use to obscure their support for law breaking.

Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law.

“Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law”

Listen to Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour opposition and the man almost certain to be Britain’s next prime minister. This week he supported the “complete siege” of Gaza, a crime against humanity, refashioning it as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Starmer has not failed to grasp the legal implications of Israel’s actions, even if he seems personally immune to the moral implications. He is trained as a human rights lawyer.

His approach even appears to be taking aback journalists not known for being sympathetic to the Palestinian case. When asked by Kay Burley of Sky News if he had any sympathy for the civilians in Gaza being treated like “human animals”, Starmer could not find a single thing to say in support.

Instead, he deflected to an outright deception: blaming Hamas for sabotaging a “peace process” that Israel both practically and declaratively buried years ago.

Confirming that the Labour party now condones war crimes by Israel, his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, has been sticking to the same script. On BBC’s Newsnight, she evaded questions about whether cutting off power and supplies to Gaza is in line with international law.

It is no coincidence that Starmer’s position contrasts so dramatically with that of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The latter was driven out of office by a sustained campaign of antisemitism smears fomented by Israel’s most fervent supporters in the UK.

(...)

This is Israel’s success. The language of international law that should apply to Gaza – of rules and norms Israel must obey – has given way to, at best, the principles of humanitarianism: acts of international charity to patch up the suffering of those whose rights are being systematically trampled on, and those whose lives are being obliterated.

Western officials are more than happy with the direction of travel. Not just for Israel’s sake but for their own too. Because one day in the future, their own populations may be as much trouble to them as Palestinians in Gaza are to Israel right now.

Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself is their downpayment.