The Israeli Embassy has seventeen Israeli “technical and administrative staff” granted visas by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The normal number for an Embassy that size would be about two. I spoke to two similar size non-EU Embassies this morning, one has two and one zero. I recall I dealt with an angry Foreign Minister during my own FCO career incensed his much larger High Commission had been refused by the FCO an increase from three to four technical and administrative staff.
Ambassador Mark Regev with Shai Masot
Shai Masot, the Israeli “diplomat” who had been subverting Britain’s internal democracy with large sums of cash and plans to concoct scandal against a pro-Palestinian British minister, did not appear in the official diplomatic list.
I queried this with the FCO, and was asked to put my request in writing. A full three weeks later and after dozens of phone calls, they reluctantly revealed that Masot was on the “technical and administrative staff” of the Israeli Embassy.
This is plainly a nonsense. Masot, as an ex-Major in the Israeli Navy and senior officer in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, is plainly senior to many who are on the Diplomatic List, which includes typists and personal assistants. There are six attaches – support staff – already on the List.
Masot was plainly not carrying out technical and administrative duties. The term is a formal one from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and it is plain from the convention that technical and administrative staff are in official status lower than the diplomatic staff. The majority of support activities are carried out in all Embassies by locally engaged staff already resident in the host country, but a very small number of technical and administrative staff may be allowed visas for work in particularly secure areas. They may be an IT and communications technician, possibly a cleaner in the most sensitive physical areas, and perhaps property management.
These staff do not interact with politicians of the host state or attend high level meetings beside the Ambassador. The level at which Shai Masot was operating was appropriate to a Counsellor or First Secretary in an Embassy. Masot’s formal rank as an officer in his cover job in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs would entitle him to that rank in the Embassy if this were a normal appointment.
The Al Jazeera documentaries plainly revealed that Masot was working as an intelligence officer, acquiring and financing “agents of influence”. It is simply impossible that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of the sixteen are already support staff. The only possible explanation, confirmed absolutely by Masot’s behaviour, is that the FCO has knowingly connived at settling a large nest of Israeli spies in London. I fairly put this to the FCO and they refused to comment.
I asked my questions on 10 January. On 12 January the FCO asked me to put them in writing. On 2 February they finally replied to the first three questions, but refused to comment on questions 4 or 5 about involvement of the intelligence services in Masot’s appointment.
Query about Shai Masot’s status
On 2 February I sent these follow-up questions to the FCO by email:
Follow up questions about Shai Masot’s status
FCO Media Department have replied that they refuse to give me any further information on the subject, and that I should proceed through a Freedom of Information request so the FCO can assess properly whether the release of any further information is in the national interest.
What is it they are always saying to us: if you have got nothing to fear, you have got nothing to hide?
I am confident I know what they are hiding, and that is FCO complicity in a large nest of Israeli spies seeking to influence policy and opinion in the UK in a pro-Israeli direction. That is why the government reaction to one of those spies being caught on camera plotting a scandal against an FCO minister, and giving £1 million to anti-Corbyn MPs, was so astonishingly muted. It is also worth noting that while the media could not completely ignore the fantastic al Jazeera documentaries that exposed the scandal, it was a matter of a brief article and no follow up digging.
This was not just a curiosity, it reveals a deep-seated problem for our democracy. I intend to continue picking at it.
You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The vicious personal attacks, the expletives, the death wishes? If you’ve read any writing like mine – writing by a Jew who acknowledges Palestinian humanity – and taken the time to look at some of the readers’ comments, you know what I mean.
Michael Lesher is an author, lawyer and Orthodox Jew who lives in Passaic, NJ. His most recent book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014).
If you don’t – well, for simplicity’s sake, let’s consider only the attacks on me personally. (Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Norman Finkelstein and my friend Jonathan Ofir, among others, have all attracted similar vituperation.) An ostensibly religious Jew has publicly called me a “deviant,” “an enemy” and “the worst kind of Jew”; he has also compared me to Nazi collaborators, concluding that since I “lack[] the morality of a sewer rat,” it might be appropriate for a truly religious Jew to murder me.
An exceptional case? I wish it were. One of my recent columns in this space called attention to the dehumanization of Palestinians who resist Israel’s occupation. In response, an assortment of Jewish readers described me as “vile,” “a sub-category of human,” “a disgusting human being,” “an enemy to Judaism” and a “self-aggrandizing demented buffoon” with “sick, twisted opinions.” Another of my fellow Orthodox Jews – borrowing a leaf from the Nazi pamphlet Entartete Kunst – suggested that my concern with Palestinian rights could only mean a taint in my Jewish lineage.
And so it goes.
I could ignore these comments, of course. But I prefer trying to understand them. For if we don’t understand what drives Jews to such bizarre slanders – all the while believing themselves completely above reproach – it’s obvious that we won’t be able to change their minds. And if we don’t, it isn’t only Palestinian rights that must suffer: people incapable of civilized discourse about the institutions they cherish are eo ipso incapable of keeping their civilization alive. So it’s dangerous to turn one’s back completely on the invective, however stupid and shallow – the very stupidity of the attacks is the index of the threat their authors pose to their own culture. And to mine.
So why do the mudslingers hate us so much? Here are few things I think I can discern behind the ranting.
1) They’ve been deceived about themselves. For decades, many Jews – particularly Israeli Jews, and those raised to identify with Israel – have been taught that they belong to a higher breed of human being, one that by nature never harms anyone needlessly. Like the citizens of Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg, they believe in their moral superiority because it’s been preached at them, incessantly, as the essence of their identity: to doubt it is to doubt themselves.
Thus the celebrated Jewish-American writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who embraced Israeli citizenship in time to assist in the torture of Palestinian prisoners and the brutal military repression that characterized the IDF’s response to the overwhelmingly nonviolent first intifada, could still kvell in print over Israel’s martial prowess and piously insist that Israeli Jews are morally superior to the Palestinians they kill.
It’s not that Goldberg is stupid or deliberately dishonest. He’s just so wedded to the fantasy of Jewish purity that he cannot acknowledge the testimony of his own eyes without imperiling his sense of identity. Like Heinrich Himmler, who boasted that SS officers, having seen “a hundred corpses lying together,” “remained decent fellows” because of the Germans’ “harmless soul” and “idealism” – qualities never found among the “alien peoples” they were forced to exterminate – Goldberg must insist, against all evidence, that Palestinians are naturally violent while “we [Israelis] don’t try to kill children.”
2) They’ve been trained in fear. Just as they’ve been taught to assume their own superiority, our critics have been taught to hate and fear those they repress. And why not? If you want to hold other people down with a clear conscience, you need to persuade yourself – or allow yourself to be persuaded – that your victims are monstrous, evil by definition. Over two years ago, I quoted in one of my columns a widely-publicized sermon in which an Orthodox rabbi advised his flock to shun all non-kosher food because “the Arabs seek nothing else but Jewish blood” – implying that Palestinians were not just murderers but vampires, longing to suck the blood from Jewish veins but thwarted when that blood is pure. (Because they aren’t, I guess.) I have yet to hear from another Orthodox Jew who found this passage grotesque; on the contrary, several denounced me for questioning it.
Conversely, such people have been taught to identify virtue exclusively with those they know. Instead of seeing loyalty, justice, compassion as qualities they share with humankind generally, their exposure to these traits in their own communities only reinforces their sense of uniqueness: if we are like that, then they cannot be. This is what Sartre had in mind when he wrote that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have to invent him.” It’s also why, as Laith Saud has remarked, those Americans (and Jews) today who want to see in themselves “an unadulterated Enlightenment” must picture the Other – Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims generally – as “purely barbaric.” To those trapped in this mindset, the good we know in ourselves must be ours alone if it is to be real.
3) They’re demoralized. Behind the bravado and the hate speech, today’s Israel-Firsters are a confused, beleaguered, unhappy lot. The state they once regarded as Olympian has revealed feet of clay. The airy utopianism of Israel’s early leaders has given way to a Jim Crow society where crowds of young Jews chant racist slogans while the Justice Minister, no less, openly condones murder. Israel supporters who rightly criticize Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, or condemn the Syrian army’s violence against civilians, are inwardly uneasy when they consider that Israel has been doing the same things for decades. They want to believe in their superiority, but facts keep getting in the way.
James Baldwin pointedly observed in the 1960s that “the absolutely prohibitive price the South has paid to keep the nigger in his place” had only “succeeded in having what is almost certainly the most bewildered, demoralized white population in the Western world.” The same is true of Israelis today, and just as true, I’m afraid, of the Jews who condemn me for repeating some of the facts about Israel’s history and its continuing occupation of Palestinian land. My sins, however these people might describe them, are venial next to the violence they’ve done to their own consciences. Jettison moral principles unless they further Jewish ethnic supremacy; throw away facts; turn your back on the human rights so painstakingly incorporated into international jurisprudence after the horrors of World War II; say no to justice and yes to apartheid; shuck off every acquaintance, every former friend who points out uncomfortable truths to you; trade your religion (if you’re religious) for a slice of stolen real estate – and what have you got to live for, except some dirt that was never yours to begin with? These Zionists are not to be envied; behind their fury, I think I can hear their pain.
So what is to be done with them? Sad to say, the obvious antidote – information to counter ignorance – is not really effective. If these people wanted the facts they would have absorbed them long ago: today, the real difficulty is keeping one’s head deep enough in the sand to avoid knowing the facts. So their ignorance is only the shell of a deeper malady.
I propose a different approach. Instead of educating our critics with facts, I suggest we first demonstrate to them the force of our own moral convictions. We do this not by answering insults with insults, but by addressing them as human beings – just as we address Palestinians. Without flagging for a moment in our pursuit of justice, we can calmly, sadly, insistently challenge our enemies to justify themselves. Do they support the occupation? Jewish settlements that violate the Geneva Convention? Why? Can they justify apartheid? Do they believe they can square Jewish ethics with robbery and violence? If so, how?
Such questions make more sense to me than apologetics. After all, it is our critics, not we, who ought to be apologizing; they, not we, who owe an explanation and a self-defense. And they need to see that we know that, and that we won’t stop affirming it, whatever happens. This may not stop the personal attacks. But I think it can shift the focus of the discourse.
By the way, I do not expect my enemies to be mollified by my attempt to understand their motives. They do not want to be understood; at bottom, they are terrified of understanding themselves.
I make the effort because justice for Palestine cannot be sought in a vacuum. Edward Said was fond of quoting a beautiful line from the poet Aimee Cesaire: “There is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.” The great things we strive for are meant for everyone. And the words we share about those goals must take everyone into consideration, too – even those who hate us.
Historian Prof. Avi Shlaim, of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, speaks about the manufactured campaign started by the Israel Lobby against the Left in the Labour Party in an interview with Haim Bresheeth
Anyone unaware of the years of research spent in dusty archives could well be forgiven for thinking this book was written in the publisher’s fast food kitchen to cash in on the current antisemitism soufflé whipped up by the unalloyed supporters of Israel and their right wing counterparts in the Labour Party and beyond.
When setting out to pen a short pamphlet on Zionism, a topic with which he was familiar and on which he believed himself to be well informed, Thomas Suarez came across some unusual references; checking their derivation lead him to the UK’s national archives at Kew and to a library of primary sources from the hands of individuals, British officials, the British secret services, national journals and Zionist organisations themselves. Many years of diligent work transformed the pamphlet into this seminal work, whose publication date fortuitously coincides with the very period when Political Zionism, having transmuted itself from a political ideology into a liberation theology deeply embedded in the existential identity of the majority of the Jewish community, has attained its apogee in popular European and American culture.
Suarez traces this trajectory from its beginnings in the second half of the 19C. to the Suez crisis of 1956. From its inception Revisionist Zionism was conceived as a biblical enterprise: building the Third Temple, founded on the rights of Jews as a race, claiming a divine right for all Jews and in the process trumping Jewish orthodoxy. The weapon of choice to carve out their temple was that of terrorism.
For many familiar with the history of the creation of Israel the received knowledge is that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the pursuit of a safe haven for Jews, attacks were targeted by the incipient Israeli army on the British garrison in Palestine, and that in the quest for a state a number of atrocities were committed by small bands of extremists, the Irgun and Lehi (Stern) gangs, epitomised by the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin.
Suarez research lead him to a very different narrative: these small bands of extremists were integral, structured components of the regular armed force, the Hagana of the Jewish Agency – no model of the Geneva Convention itself, with its elite corps, the Palmach, its assassination unit the Pum and its deployment of barrel bombs loaded with shrapnel. All five groups were engaged in the programme of intimidation and terror, where the end, Eretz Israel – an exclusively Jewish state stretching east from the Mediterranean to include Transjordan, and from Egypt to the Lebanese boarder – justified Revisionist Zionism’s means. Obstacles in its path were the British, the other key players in the UN Partition plan, and not least the awkward existence of the indigenous occupants of Palestine.
Violence to the Palestinians, modelled on the antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, is traced to commence from the first settlers prior to the First World War, developing through the inter-war period, and rising to a crescendo of public bombing and the poisoning of wells with typhoid and dysentary, to provoke a reaction and to create a premise for full scale military operations in the period leading up to 1948. It culminated in the massacres of the inhabitants of tens of villages and the raising of many hundreds more: planned by military intelligence gatherers posing as hiking tourists, Plan Dalet was devised and executed, to create the Nachba of 900,00 refugees. The records show that, contrary to common understanding, the wanton violence was not brought to an end by the declaration of the state of Israel but was maintained, and continues to this day.
A significant portion of the book simply enumerates the hundreds of attacks on the British presence in Palestine, which hit both military and civilian targets. Violence to the regional powers ranged from assassination plans and actual attempts on the life of Churchill, Eden and Ernest Bevan, sabotage of British forces during WWII (compromising their capacity); plans to explode bombs in London, and UK facilities in France, Austria and Italy (mostly but not all foiled); false flag operations (such as the Lavrone affair in Egypt & the Bagdad Trials in Iraq) to ‘create’ antisemitic movements to justify Zionist demands; the sinking of British ships (resulting in 276 deaths) carrying Jewish refugees, when, contrary to Zionist demands they were diverted away from Palestine; the training and the use of child operators; selective assassinations of leading Jewish critics (most of the assassinations carried out by the Irgun and Stern gangs were of anti-zionist Jewish individuals); sabotaging Jewish anit-zionist printing presses and the targeting of institutions such as the Hashoma Club which argued for a two state solution. The litany is extensive and shocking.
Another dimension to the Zionist’s agenda was that they did all in their power to direct Jewish refugees away from offers of asylum by western democracies and to exert pressurise to divert Jews to Palestine. To this effect they were instrumental in seeing that Roosevelt’s plan in 1938 to accept 400,000 from Nazis Germany came to nothing.
It is instructive that these early Zionists listed in order of priority the opposition which they saw as critical: first were the anti-zionists in the Jewish communities, second came the offers of asylum from the democracies, and third was antisemitism. They referred to Jewish anti-zionists as ‘kikes’ which is the ’N’ word for Jew.
In the UK the startling rise of Jeremy Corbyn to leadership of the Labour Party, a person who has been both a life long champion of Palestinian human rights and a socialist committed to the substantial redistribution of wealth back to the poor, created major tremors simultaneously in the conservative and the Jewish establishments. Desperate to mount a counter-attack they seized on antisemitism as their weapon: a tool which, as this book describes, was fashioned by the Political Zionists from their beginning and was well honed over the ensuing decades in their drive to control the destiny of the Jewish community.
There are many quotations in the book from UK, UN, US and other international observers of parallels between the Irgun and Stern gang’s organisation and methods and those of the Nazis – statements which today would surely lead to expulsion from the Labour Party. A footnote observes that the relevant ‘Polkes’ papers in the Israeli archives remain classified. Referencing from Suarez’s book at a Labour Party meeting would certainly incur the wrath any Jewish Labour Movement or Labour Friends of Israel member present. It must be the author’s diligence in meticulously referencing every description of the legion of ruthless objectives and acts owned by the political and military wings of Zionism which has safeguarded him from legal action by the ‘lawfare’ department of Israel’s hasbora machine. (The references occupy one quarter of the book).
Intelligence reports in the period prior to 1948 put the Irgun and Stern gangs’ numbers at 8500, the Palmach at 5000, the Hagana army at 90,000, and a total call up potential of a fully equipped army and airforce of 200,000. (A Goliath against an ill equipped and disorganised alliance of squabbling Davids). It was from their positions in the comparatively small terrorist groups that the future leaders of Israel were able to set the agenda of violence to build Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall – who, as the father of the Irgun, put his boots where his mouth was. As small cogs in the gears of the military machine, in an environment where the British were exhausted by war and desperate to withdraw, and where the rule of law was disintegrating, these terrorist groups were able to dictate and drive the strategy: a reign of terror across the Mandate, with its tentacles reaching into the heart of its European masters to create mayhem until their objective was conceded. Conceived in a state of terror, terror became the new state’s modus vivendi, and its current leaders continue this macabre dance, still fixated on pursuit of the Third Temple.
It is this context which make sense of the seemingly incongruous fact that the commanders of the Irgun and Stern gangs, Ben Gurion, Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became the first leaders of the new Israeli state. It also provides the historical context for the fact that Israel to this day has not defined its eastern boarder, and provides an explanation as to why successive peace talks, dating back to 1949 have produced no resolution.
For post 1948 second and third generation Jews growing up with a partial, bowdlerised narrative of Zionism, reading this book will either be a traumatic experience or it will be another volume to be consigned to the antisemitic waste bin. It is now well recognised that post Holocaust second generation Jews enveloped themselves and their children in a silence about their past. Suarez’s account of Zionist terror, which predated the Holocaust and which emanated from the pogroms of the 18C. and 19C., has exposed a second dimension of silence, in which the consolidation of Revisionist and Political Zionism has deployed the image of Humanitarian Zionism to cloak its past. For very many Jews Zionism is genuinely core to their identity, the very sense of their self, the solution to millennia of persecution. Suarez reveals it to have been yet another false flag on a grandiose and grotesque scale.
However, some third and fourth generation Jews, having looked beneath the cloak, have made the difficult and uncomfortable journey to disavowing Political-revisionist Zionism and are reasserting the international and Jewish values of human rights. It was wholly predictable that this would provoke a knee jerk response from the Political Zionists who have reached for their historical weapon of antisemitism, whilst those of us in a stubborn minority wave a contrary flag, that anti-zionism is not antisemitism, and seek to reclaim the genuine Jewish socialist tradition forged by the BUND in the period of revolutionary working class organisation at the start of the 20C. There is a Jewish tradition that even the smallest of minority voices shall be recorded, because one day they may prove to be the ones which should have been heeded.
This review first appeared in a shorter version in Labour Briefing
In these videos Black Jewish Labour activist Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, describes how she was targeted by the Zionist Israel Lobby, and falsely accused as being anti-Semitic. The Al Jazeera series The Lobby, uncovered the shenanigans of the Israel embassy and its Senior Political Advisor, Shai Masot, in four programme during January 2017. The investigation detailed how the embassy worked with Zionist organisations within the Labour Party to defame and harass critics of Israel. Jackie, iconic for her proclamation of her joint Jewish and Black identities was a prime target of this campaign.
Free Speech on Israel were proud to support the vigil of suspended black Labour Party activist, Marc Wadsworth outside London Labour Party offices today, 1 February. The combined presence of Black and Jewish activists made a powerful statement about the illegitimacy of victimising life-long anti-racists for invented slurs of antisemitism.
FSOI supporting Marc Wasdswoth vigil
Marc’s supporters issued this call which FSOI responded to.
Labour has excluded from membership or suspended prominent Black activists as part of a shameful purge. The main target of the rightwing witch-hunters are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn’s progressive politics, including his friend and ally Marc Wadsworth, the veteran anti-racist and human rights activist.
Wadsworth’s “crime” is that he dared call out anti-Corbyn Labour MP Ruth Smeeth at the June 2016 launch of the Chakrabarti report into Labour anti-semitism and racism and raise the under-representation of Africans, Caribbeans and Asians at the event. At a time when anti-semitism has been cynically weaponised to attack the Labour leader and his closest supporters, anti-Black racism and Islamophobia have been conveniently ignored. This vigil is being held outside the Labour hearing for Wadsworth the party has been forced to hold because of huge political pressure. It begins the Black community’s fightback against Labour injustice.For too long the party has taken for granted Black people, its most loyal supporters it needs to win back power. Now Labour has cracked down on Black activists telling truth to power to silence their voices. And, in solidarity with them, we say: Enough is enough.
A major part of the accusation against Wadsworth was a totally confected claim by Zionist MP Ruth Smeeth which FSOI refuted at the time it was made
One question was from a Daily Telegraph journalist about a Momentum leaflet on deselection of Labour MPs. The leaflet had been handed out by Marc Wadsworth, a Black activist and journalist. He had refused to hand a leaflet to Ruth Smeeth who had been pointed out to him as one of the first MPs to call for Corbyn’s resignation – he had never come across her of heard of her before. Wadsworth had seen the Telegraph journalist, Kate McCann, hand her copy of the leaflet to Smeeth and the two sat together. Wadsworth accused Smeeth of collaboration with the media. Smeeth, whose Jewish heritage was totally unknown to Wadsworth chose to interpret the accusation as an antisemitic slur and departed the room. Later she claimed, despite video evidence to the contrary, to have fled the room in tears.
Black activists are asking for individuals to express their support by emailing
[email protected]
I..(insert your name), call on you as Labour’s General Secretary to immediately lift the unjust suspension from party membership of veteran activist Marc Wadsworth. Please acknowledge receipt of my email.
Labour must reinstate anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth
Marc received support in a letter in the Guardian signed by an impressive selection of respected public figures headed by former Head of the Equal Opportunities Commission Herman Ouseley
We call on Labour’s general secretary to lift the unjust suspension from Labour membership of veteran anti-racist campaigner Marc Wadsworth. It is a cause for serious concern that Wadsworth is one of several prominent black activists suspended or excluded by the party, which has historically relied on Africans, Caribbeans and Asians, its most loyal voters, to get many Labour MPs elected. Labour cannot hope to get back into power without black support. Black people, and their anti-racist allies in these troubled times, will be watching closely to see how this matter is handled.
We are making public our support for Wadsworth because, after a more than six month wait, he will on Wednesday be interviewed by Labour officials and a demonstration will be held to support him.
It is scandalous that Wadsworth was suspended by the general secretary, Iain McNicol, because he dared to challenge a Labour MP who was a high-profile opponent of the democratically elected Labour leader, and raise the issue of black political under-representation at the launch of the Shami Chakrabarti report into antisemitism and racism. Fortunately, the moment when Wadsworth spoke out was captured on a video that has been widely publicised by the media. It clearly demonstrates he is not guilty of antisemitism.
We note that Wadsworth has a long record of fighting against racism and antisemitism, inside and outside the Labour party and trade union movement, and demand that he is reinstated immediately.
Herman OuseleyChair, Kick it Out, Linda Bellos, Peter Tatchell, Prof Paul Gilroy, Prof Gus John, Prof Pat Thane, Suresh GroverThe Monitoring Group, Stafford ScottTottenham Rights, Dr Iqbal Scram, Peter HerbertSociety of Black Lawyers, Simon WoolleyOperation Black Vote, Jackie Walker, Orson Nava, Gary Younge
