Exclusive: Labour’s top team has accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from pro-Israel funders.
JOHN MCEVOY
9 JULY 2024
Pro-Israel lobbyists have donated to 13 out of Labour’s 25 cabinet members since they were first elected to parliament, Declassified can reveal.
The list of recipients includes prime minister Keir Starmer, his deputy Angela Rayner, chancellor Rachel Reeves, foreign secretary David Lammy and home secretary Yvette Cooper.
Jonathan Reynolds, who will oversee arms exports to Israel as UK trade secretary, is another beneficiary, alongside Labour’s election mastermind Pat McFadden, whose responsibilities now include national security.
Some of the donations were provided by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a lobby group which takes MPs on “fact-finding” missions to the region.
Reeves, McFadden, Reynolds and technology secretary Peter Kyle were recently listed as vice-chairs of LFI.
Other major funders include pro-Israel businessmen Trevor Chinn and Stuart Roden.
The total value of the donations amounts to over £300,000.
Labour Friends of Israel
LFI does not disclose its funders, but was revealed during an undercover Al Jazeera documentary in 2017 to have close relations with the Israeli embassy in London.
The organisation’s parliamentary officer, Michael Rubin, was secretly filmed saying LFI and the Israeli embassy “work really closely together, but a lot of it is behind the scenes”.
Joan Ryan, a former Labour MP and LFI chair, was also filmed discussing a potential £1m payment with an Israeli embassy official.
Seven members of Starmer’s cabinet have accepted LFI funding to visit Israel, including Reeves, Lammy, and health secretary Wes Streeting.
While Starmer has not received funding from LFI, he has addressed a number of the organisation’s events.
In a keynote speech to its annual lunch in November 2021, he repeated the racist and colonial adage that Israel was founded by “social democrats who made the desert flower”.
In October 2023, Starmer said that LFI was “an invaluable source of energy and ideas for me and my team”.
His health chief Streeting meets regularly with LFI inside Westminster, according to Middle East Eye.
Israel lobby organisations have also funded advisers to Starmer’s cabinet team.
The European Leadership Network (ELNET), a lobby group which aims to strengthen ties between Israel and Europe, has paid for Streeting and Bridget Phillipson’s parliamentary staffers to visit Israel.
A parliamentary adviser who went on the delegation told openDemocracy: “there was a clear and obvious agenda to make sure people had a pro-Israel stance going into government”.
The staffer added that, after returning from the trip, a senior figure at the Israeli embassy asked: “Did you enjoy the trip we sent you on?”
ELNET’s funders include the American billionaire Bernie Marcus, who is a supporter of Donald Trump and a major donor to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 