It’s time to put Conservatives’ links with Israel under the spotlight

Conservative Friends of Israel boasts that its membership includes 80 per cent of Tory MPs. It can whistle up cabinet ministers for its lunches and dinners, and has superb access to Downing Street, Westminster and Whitehall. There are queues round the block to its famous party at the annual Tory conference.

The Conservative historian and politician Robert Rhodes James defined the CFI as “the largest organisation in Western Europe dedicated to the cause of the people of Israel”.

That was 40 years ago. Its influence has grown substantially since.

Here’s an example. During the Conservative leadership contest of summer 2022, the CFI hosted a leadership hustings – as far as I can discover, the only lobby group for a foreign country ever to play such a role.

Ahead of the hustings, Liz Truss wrote a letter to the CFI, pledging to consider following the example of Donald Trump and moving the British embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

This represented a dramatic change from established doctrine. In common with most of the world, British policy had been to keep our embassy in Tel Aviv until a final peace agreement was reached.

Truss reaffirmed her commitment to Jerusalem almost immediately after she became prime minister at a meeting with her Israeli counterpart. The idea was eventually dumped by Rishi Sunak. It would likely have gone ahead had Truss survived.

Another classic case in point concerns the former Tory minister Sir Alan Duncan.

In 2011, as junior minister in charge of foreign aid at the Department for International Development, he took part in a government video in which he said that Israel had carried out a “land grab” in the occupied Palestinian territories.

These remarks were greeted with fury by the Conservative Friends of Israel. The organisation’s then director Stuart Polack told the Jewish Chronicle: “CFI raised this at the highest levels of government immediately after the video was posted.”

“Highest levels of government” is Whitehall code for Downing Street.

Stuart Polack explained: “We were assured that this was not government policy, and no Foreign Office minister would concur with these assessments.”

DFID stood by Duncan, accurately asserting that his “comments reflect the consistently held government position that settlements are illegal and are an obstacle to peace and the two-state solution”.

But CFI won the day. David Cameron ordered the video to be taken down.

Alan Duncan’s diaries, In the Thick of It, contain a rare – and colourfully candid – account of CFI engagement with high British politics. A profound sense of grievance emerges from these diaries, and Duncan clearly believes that he is being targeted by CFI simply for supporting the rights of Palestinians.

He accuses CFI of “actively lobbying” against him for his Palestinian sympathies. Though the diary does at moments appear overwrought, self-serving and filled with a sense of victimhood, it is easy to see why. Supposing his account is true, Duncan felt vulnerable with good reason.

According to Duncan, Theresa May offered him the post of Middle East minister in the July 2016 government reshuffle which followed the Brexit referendum.

Duncan records that, later the same day, the newly appointed foreign secretary Boris Johnson told him that CFI had got wind of the appointment, was “going ballistic”, and had called him “incessantly, saying I must not be appointed”. In preparation for this article, I asked CFI if this account was accurate. No response.

Duncan’s diaries contain a detailed account of the high-level lobbying operation which, he says, stopped him getting the Middle East job, leaving no doubt that the instruction came from Theresa May’s Downing Street.

The following year, an Al Jazeera undercover documentary exposed an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, promising to “take down” Sir Alan, egged on by an aide to another Conservative minister. There is no suggestion that CFI had anything to do with this assault on Alan Duncan. The Israeli embassy appears to have been the instigator.

CFI influence on the Conservative Party is not new. In my Channel 4 documentary, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, I exposed how the CFI went into action in 2006 after then shadow foreign secretary William Hague called that year’s bloody Israeli assault on South Lebanon “disproportionate” in strongly worded public criticism on the floor of the Commons.

CFI secured a meeting with Cameron in which the Tory leader gave what was understood as an undertaking not to use the word “disproportionate” (a term fraught with legal significance in conflicts in urban environments with heavy civilian casualties) again.

Throughout his time as Tory leader and British prime minister, Cameron was as good as his word. He never once used the word in connection with any Israeli conflict. Nor has he as foreign secretary during the current Gaza conflict.

Or consider Michael Gove’s Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill, now going through its committee stage in the Lords. It delivers on a central objective of Netanyahu’s foreign policy – protecting Israel against the threat of international isolation by blocking public bodies from supporting sanctions, boycotts and divestment campaigns against Israel.

Most unusually, the bill singles out Israel, the Occupied West Bank and the Golan Heights for special protection. It thus puts not just Israel, but also the occupied Palestinian territories and the occupied Golan Heights, out of reach of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

And not just that. By conflating Israel with the territories it has occupied by military force, the bill flatly contradicts existing British foreign policy commitments.

Sunak has pressed ahead in the face of warnings from his own Foreign Office officials that the bill contradicts British foreign policy, and represents a propaganda gift for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

As BBC reporters Ione Wells and Tom Bateman revealed, a Foreign Office letter to Downing Street in May “suggests Moscow would use it to show the UK did not uphold the international rules-based system and was therefore ‘being hypocritical in our treatment of “annexed territory”’ in relation to Britain’s condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

The BBC also revealed that Foreign Office lawyers advised that a clause in the bill “would significantly increase the risk of the UK being in breach of our commitments under [UNSC resolution] 2334”.

When the bill entered committee stage in the Commons, not a single Palestinian was invited to give evidence to Parliament. Yet a raft of pro-Israeli voices were heard. CFI gave evidence – but no balancing invitation for Conservative Friends of Palestine, chaired by former Cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi.

UK Lawyers for Israel gave evidence – but no balancing invitation for Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. And so on.

Seven of the 10 Conservative MPs on the 19-member committee said they had visited Israel on trips organised by Conservative Friends of Israel. Six of them revealed that they were personal friends of the executive director of Conservative Friends of Israel and one of the witnesses.

Just one MP, Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, said she had been on a trip organised by the Council for Arab-British Understanding, which stands up for Palestinian human rights.

As this episode shows, it is all but impossible for Palestinians voices to get seriously heard either in the Conservative Party or in the House of Commons. Conservative Friends of Palestine was formed only recently, and has a tiny following among MPs.

This balance of forces helps explain why Rishi Sunak has suffered negligible political damage from his declared policy of “unequivocal” support for Benjamin Netanyahu.

Should we worry about this? The case for the Conservative Party’s deep friendship with Israel is based around the idea that Britain and Israel are driven by the same values.

Fair enough. But when Israel turns its back on the moral code we allegedly share, doesn’t that mean we should say so?

Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s most feted post-war prime minister, was fiercely pro-Jewish and an enemy of antisemitism. But she was never afraid to call out Israeli war crimes, and did so repeatedly.

When the Israeli army stood by in September 1982 as Christian Phalangists slaughtered Palestinian refugees and Lebanese citizens in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps, she described the massacres as “an act of pure barbarism”.

Isn’t that what true friendship is all about? That’s why I believe Conservative Friends of Israel has an obligation to speak up for those values when they are violated.

Yet CFI never does so. It has never made a noise about what historian Richard Evans recently labelled the “murderous criminality” of Israel’s illegal settlement-building programme.

It never even points out the damage these settlements inflict on the peace process.

It didn’t criticise the 2018 nation-state law, which effectively established two categories of Israeli citizenship – one for Jews and one for Arabs, opening Israel up to the judgement, shared by all major human groups, that it is an apartheid state.

It never rebukes the naked racism, and notoriously genocidal discourse, of Netanyahu and his ministers.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, it has not criticised a single action of Israel during this terrible Gaza war. Ahead of publication, I asked CFI whether it had ever criticised any action by Israel. No reply.

I also asked whether CFI has criticised Benjamin Netanyahu or any member of his government during the current Gaza conflict. No reply.

CFI has been ready, however, to criticise the British government. Last year, CFI hon president Lord Polack accused the government of “effectively boycotting” an Israeli minister after then foreign secretary James Cleverly said he had no plans to work with far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

“It is not about whether one agrees with minister Ben-Gvir,” said Polak. “We work with all elected Israeli politicians, and we must be very careful not to go down a route of suggesting that our support for Israel is somehow conditional on any individual politician.”

He asked: “Could we be holding Israel to a different standard from other countries?”

Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s national security minister, has been convicted in Israel of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.

Late last month, CFI officers, including the MPs Theresa Villiers and Bob Blackman, criticised the British government in Foreign Office Questions for sending the wrong messages after Britain supported the United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Conservative Friends of Israel has started to look much less like a friend of Israel and much more like the London outpost for Netanyahu’s far-right extremist Likud coalition. That’s bad news for the Conservative Party, bad news for Britain and – in my opinion – dreadful for Israel itself.

Peter Oborne is the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph