Groucho Marxism

There can be no doubt now that the Zionist lobby has a huge influence on UK politics. Some go so far as to argue that the UK government is effectively occupied by Israel. In the past I have rubbished this claim – mainly because it sounds ridiculous, but also because it seems to come dangerously close to the ‘Jews control the world’ trope: the idea that a small, secretive Jewish cabal manipulates national governments for malevolent purposes. Recently, though, I have been starting to wonder whether there might be some truth to the idea that the UK government is effectively being controlled by Israel, to the extent that labeling it an ‘occupation’ might not be so ridiculous after all. In this blog post I will go through some of the evidence behind this claim.

Before getting into the evidence, though, I need to head off the charge that just by considering this as a possibility I am giving tacit support to the ‘Jews control the world’ conspiracy theory. A theory is only a conspiracy theory if it is not backed up by evidence. As soon as a theory is backed up by sufficient evidence it stops being a conspiracy theory and becomes a fact. We also need to be clear that we are talking specifically about Israel and the Zionist lobby here, not Jews in general. However, we do need to take into account the maxim popularized by the American physicist Carl Sagan: ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. The claim that the UK government is occupied by Israel is certainly extraordinary; the question is whether the evidence is sufficiently extraordinary to support it.

Let’s start with the treatment of the Palestine Action activists. Six political prisoners associated with Palestine Action currently being held in British jails are on hunger strike. They are demanding to be released on bail and the right to a fair trial. Most have already been held on remand far longer than the normal six-month maximum which the law allows before trial, and their condition is deteriorating rapidly. All have been accused of being involved in Palestine Action campaigns carried out before the ban on the protest group was implemented earlier this year. Recall that Palestine Action was infamously banned as a ‘terrorist’ group by the British government last summer, following a relentless lobbying campaign from Israel and its representatives in the UK.

The idea that Palestine Action is a terrorist group is obviously nonsense. Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The crime committed by the Palestine Action activists involved throwing red paint on some military planes. These activists didn’t just avoid targeting any non-combatants – they avoided targeting people altogether. Who exactly was being ‘terrorized’ here? This is about as far from terrorism as it is possible to get! The real reason Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organization becomes clear when you find out the Yvette Cooper, who was Home Secretary at the time, received a concurrent £215,000 bribe from the Zionist lobby.

It gets fishier though. Palestine Action’s co-founder, Palestinian-Iraqi activist Huda Ammori, was at the High Court this week challenging the ban. Last month the judge on this high-profile case was replaced at the last minute by a three-judge panel led by Victoria Sharp, a former principal adviser to Robert Maxwell, an Israeli spy. That’s the same Robert Maxwell who was the father of Ghislane Maxwell, who in 2021 was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It is becoming clear that Epstein was in personal contact with political leaders from around the world, including the UK. Influential former Labour politician Peter Mandelson, for example, maintained a close friendship with Epstein.

Many prominent British politicians have links with Israel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has family in Israel, has strong connections to pro-Israel groups, and has promoted UK-Israel ties. He has also gone on record as saying he supports Zionism “without qualification”, has repeatedly refused to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and has received donations from the Labour Friends of Israel lobbying group. Starmer and Cooper are not the only British MP to have received bribes from the Zionist lobby: the entire Labour cabinet is apparently on the Israeli payroll. And it’s not just Labour either. According to Declassified UK, some 180 of Britain’s 650 MPs in the last parliament have accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups or individuals.

Then there’s the obvious bias in the British media. Many journalists working at Britain’s most prestigious newspapers and TV channels have expressed concern at pro-Israel bias inside their organisations – although few have expressed these concerns in public, for fear of losing their jobs. The pro-Israel bias should be clear to anyone who has witnessed the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This is perhaps most acute at the supposedly impartial BBC. According to the Centre for Media Monitoring, the BBC treats Palestinian deaths as less newsworthy, systematically uses language bias favouring Israelis, suppresses genocide allegations, and interviews significantly fewer Palestinians than Israelis (and the figures all back up these claims).

Taking all of the above into account, the idea that the UK is occupied by Israel starts to seem a lot more plausible. And this is hardly the full extent of the evidence; we have barely scratched the surface. It seems the more you look into this, the more you find the Zionist lobby pulling the strings. If we really want to understand where power lies we have to follow the evidence – and the evidence points unequivocally to Israel.