Whereas Mearsheimer and Walt dealt mainly with the role of the Israel lobby in the United States, Matt Kennard here deals with the same question, empirically, in the UK. The message of both is clear. Israel controls key elements of Western politics in a manner that evidently contradicts even rationally determined British or US imperialist interests. Thus Israel is not a strategic asset of its imperialist cohorts, but a strategic liability.
Max Blumenethal speaks of “dogmatic Marxists” on the left that insist that Israel is a puppet of Western, particularly US imperialism, and deny reality. We differ, and consider this denial of reality comes from the baleful influence of Bundism, and partly left-Zionism on the left, which are at odd with genuine Marxism.
This is also useful empirical material that we will be citing in future material.
For those who need to cite this material, a transcript (excluding the brief intro, which is extracted from the body of the interview) is here:
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of @DeclassifiedUK. He is the author of three books: Irregular Army, The Racket & Silent Coup.
Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist from Gaza and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers.
Ahmed Alnaouq:
Welcome to Palestine Deep Dive.
Today, I’m glad to be joined by British journalist Matt Kennard. He’s an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified UK. Matt is a friend of our show; he has been here many times before, and today we’re going to talk about the British foreign policy on Palestine. Matt, it is good to have you again. We have met many times after the 7th of October. You have interviewed me many times, actually. I remember one of them was in Frontline Club; it was one of my favorite panel discussions I ever had. But today, we would like to talk about the UK’s foreign policy, especially when it comes to Gaza and Israel and Palestine after the 7th of October. This week, we heard that the UK started sending planes to Gaza to do air drops.
If you ask me personally, I think this is a sham. I think it’s useless, it’s hypocritical, it’s inadequate, and it’s just a media stunt, and we Palestinians we see through these media stunts. We have a lot of borders in Gaza, five crossings with Israel, and we have one crossing with Egypt. There are thousands and thousands of trucks full of aid and assistance that are ready to come to Gaza, but Israel is blocking all of that. Then we see the UK or the US sending some planes to do air drops in Gaza, which is very tiny. It’s inadequate, it’s not enough, it’s very, very dangerous. We have heard that during this week, the same week that the UK sent these planes full of assistance, 18 people were killed in Gaza, 18 people killed while we have some crossings with Israel and with Egypt, and Israel is not allowing this assistance to come, and the UK doesn’t say anything about it.
We heard that the UK voted for a ceasefire in the UN Security Council, but at the same time, Israel did not listen. For me, it was a farce, and after hearing about all of this, seeing that Israel is not listening to the UN Security Council, it’s not listening to the UN General Assembly. No matter what the world is doing, Israel is not listening, and I know for sure that behind Israel are the UK and the US, who are supporting Israel with whatever it needs in order to keep on the genocide. So, we know that the lip service, this is all a lip service that the US and the UK are doing. At the same time, Israel is continuing its massacres, its genocide, its starvation against the Palestinian people.
So as a Palestinian, I would like to ask you more, especially about the UK foreign policy in Gaza. I want to understand more because I’m a Palestinian who lives in the UK and I really want to understand who is benefiting Israel, who is helping Israel to continue its genocide, and I would like to start with this topic, the UK airdrops to Gaza. The UK airdrops to Gaza, as I said, are inadequate, but they sent some planes to do airdrops to Gaza. But these planes are not the first planes that the UK has sent to Gaza since the 7th of October. And I think you are the right person to talk about this because you have written extensively on the planes that the UK sent to Gaza.
Can you tell me more about these planes other than the airdrops, please?
Matt Kennard: Yeah, sure. I mean, I agree with you that these airdrops are window dressing. They’re a public relations exercise because they come in the context of extensive and multifaceted support for Israel in material ways, material military ways. That has basically been in place since October 7th when the attack on Gaza started, started on the day of the Hamas attack. And interestingly, none of it, basically zero information about the UK’s role, which is extensive, has appeared in the mainstream media in Britain. Nearly all of it has been done by Declassified UK and by me and Mark Curtis, principally. And so, I’ll give you a little background on how I got into the story because it revolves particularly around one country, which is Cyprus, which sits about 200 miles from Gaza, about a 40-minute flight time from Tel Aviv.
And the UK has two huge military and intelligence bases on Cyprus, which it has retained since 1960 because Cyprus was a British colony. It got independence in 1960, but it didn’t actually get independence. Interestingly, because the UK retains these bases. And they’re not just bases; they comprise 3% of the land mass of Cyprus, and that’s 100 square miles. And I’ve been to them. There are military bases and intelligence bases on them, but they’re also wide expanses of land. Anyway, one of those bases is this airbase called RAF Akrotiri, which is huge. It has become the international hub, the most significant place in the world for the international effort to support the Israeli attack on Gaza. It was characterized as such by Haaretz, the liberal Zionist newspaper in Israel.
So again, none of this has appeared in the mainstream media, but when the genocide started and the savage air campaign started, I had an inkling that maybe they were using RAF Akrotiri to deliver weapons. And I would see nothing about it in the media. I asked the UK government and the UK military to give me information, and they wouldn’t. So, then what I did was I joined flight tracking websites. These are websites where you can get information about what flights are going to and from different airports around the world. And I started looking at what was happening from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv. And this was the first story I did on this. It was about a month in, and I totted up how many flights had gone of military aircraft, UK to Tel Aviv, and it was 33, nearly one a day, or actually over one a day.
And I contacted the Ministry of Defence and said, look, you’ve said you’re not going to tell me, but I found 33. And then they panicked and said, actually, we found that we can tell you now, how many we’ve sent, and we sent 17. And we published that story that they’d sent 17 military transport vehicles. I should talk about what those military transport vehicles are. They’re basically nearly all of them were either C-17s or A400Ms, which are huge military transport vehicles. You can take weapons in them, you can put tanks in them, you can put Chinook helicopters. You can put tanks in them. Yeah, and you can put up over 150 personnel as well. So, it makes, and also, very importantly, none of these military transport vehicles had gone from RFA Akoteri to Tel Aviv before October 7th.
Okay, so this was a new dynamic and a new route being flown by these. So, I was like, okay, so that’s interesting in itself that they’re trying to keep this secret. And then we started looking into what the US was doing as well, because the US, the other point about RAF Akoteri and the UK bases on Cyprus is they’re also US installations. But we’re not allowed to have any information about what the US does there. In fact, Declassified the previous year, when I went there, one of the stories I did was to reveal for the first time how many US airmen are on RAF Akoteri. It’s 129, and a whole US spy force is based there as well.
But anyway, so I started asking them again, okay, you’re now telling us that the RAF has sent 17 military transport flights. What about the US Air Force? Are they using RAF Akoteri, UK territory to send weapons and bombs for the F-35s, F-16s that they’re using in Gaza? And they wouldn’t provide any information again. And then we found that in Haaretz, they reported that dozens of US Air Force planes were stopping in RAF Akoteri and delivering weapons to Israel. So, we published that story. And then we found that subsequent to that, that 500 British soldiers have been deployed to Cyprus in the aftermath of October 7th to support Israel. And we revealed that, Declassified, that wasn’t public knowledge. And I’ll finish. So this is all happening.
One of the really important parts of it that we also reported on was that UK special forces were deployed to Cyprus. Now, special forces are interesting because they’re part of the UK military, but they’re completely secret. They’re like an elite force, the SAS, also the SBS, the Special Boat Service, that the UK government uses around the world in complete secret. They were in Yemen. They were in Syria. They’re in loads of places that no one really knows about. Anyway, there was an article in The Sun on October 27th saying that the SAS had deployed to Cyprus to… The leak to The Sun was that they were to support hostage rescue.
And then the following day, the D-Notice Committee, which people might not know, but D-Notice Committee is a UK military-run censorship organization, that sends out these advisories to the media not to publish stuff. So, they sent out an advisory to the media saying no one should publish information about UK special forces and their role in Gaza. And from that, go on…
AA: But you wrote about all of that. You wrote about the planes. You wrote about the soldiers. How did the media react to it?
MK: Well, so there was no further comment. There was no mainstream media coverage of SAS after that Sun article because they all abided by the D-Notice advisory, which I think makes them complicit, right? It’s meant to be voluntary. So, they don’t have to abide by it, but yet they’re covering up for the government. And we don’t know what the special forces were doing.
My hunch is that they’re in Israel advising the military. They might be in a combat role in Gaza. They might have been, but we don’t know. But anyway, to go back to your question about what was the media reaction to the stories we were doing, there was no reaction. None of the information I’ve just given has ever appeared in the mainstream media.
AA: Why do you think?
MK: Why do I think? Because the mainstream media is basically captured. We don’t have independent journalists there. They are not tasked, or they don’t task themselves with revealing the truth about what the UK government is doing and what the UK military is doing.
AA: But that’s a big statement, Matt.
MK: Yes.
AA: Not even the left media?
MK: The Guardian has never published anything about any of this stuff.
So, to bring you up to more recently, because this was the early work we were doing, by February we did an article where we found that 48 military transport vehicles had gone from Akrotiri to Israel, 65 spy flights had been flown by the RAF over Gaza from RAF Akrotiri, oh, and nine military aircraft had landed in the UK since October 7th. Not one of those things has ever been reported in the mainstream media, ever. Which is mad, really, because this is a country that’s been investigated for genocide at the ICJ. And this is evidence that the UK is materially complicit. If we had a free press, that’d be on the front page. The nine Israeli military jets that landed in the UK, I mean, again, we published it in Declassified.
Not one word that has ever appeared in mainstream media. So, interestingly, the flip side of that is that there has been reaction in Cyprus. So, there’s been huge protests, including at RAF Akrotiri. And in the streets of Limassol, which is the second city in Cyprus, which is next to RAF Akrotiri, there was a big protest. And then the president of Cyprus, the president of Northern Cyprus also, they were both questioned about it and made statements. And even when they did that, it still wasn’t covered in the mainstream media in the UK. And this just goes, this goes to the heart of what, of the problems of the media system in this country, that you can have this whole reality that is just completely removed from the public record by the media.
And if we weren’t revealing it, no one would know about this stuff. And only our readers know about it. It’s not known in a general sense So the UK is complicit in multifaceted ways and material ways in the genocide in Gaza. And there’s been no mention of it in the mainstream media. And there’s been obviously zero investigation by mainstream journalists of that role. There’s only two of us reporters who work at Declassified. How is it that we are the only ones that are revealing this stuff? How is it that, imagine if the resources of the Guardian or the BBC were used to reveal British complicity? Number one, you’d probably have ministers being investigated by the ICC, and number two, it would definitely help bring about the end of that support because most people are outraged by the genocide.
If they knew that their own government was materially complicit, they would put more pressure on the government to stop.
AA: So, I really want to understand why is happening. Because the UK is not an autocratic government. I mean, if the media talks about it, it’s most likely there will not be a retribution from the government or something. So why is the media doing this? Why are they not interested?
MK: It’s a very good question, and it’s one that has a really long answer. I mean, I think that the mainstream media is set up to protect entrenched interests. It’s not set up to protect the government. So, it does publish stories about like sort of scandals or party political scandals. But in terms of entrenched interests, they protect them.
And that goes for the Guardian, as well as the Telegraph and the Times and others. It’s got much worse recently. Like the Guardian used to, maybe the Guardian 10 years ago or 20 years ago, would have been doing the stories that we’re doing, but they don’t do it anymore. And there are deeper reasons for that as well. But I think that part of it is that they come from the same milieu as the government. They go to the same universities. They go to the same elite private schools. And there’s just not a desire to cover this stuff that makes the government look bad.
AA: Maybe more these media outlets don’t trust your reports? So can I ask about your research? How did you get this information? And how certain are you that they are true and factual?
MK: Well, number one, we’ve never had any, we’ve never had to issue a correction once in history, in Declassified’s history. And everything is based on the initial stories, which were done through the flight tracker websites. And the later figures for the 48 aircraft, they were got from Parliament themselves because despite the media not covering it, there have been a few parliamentarians who have been working really hard to get information about this. One particularly is called Kenny McCaskill. He’s the ALBA MP for East Lothian, and he’s been asking relentless parliamentary questions. Now there’s a system in the UK called parliamentary questions, where if you’re in the Lords or in the House of Commons, you can put down questions that different departments have to answer.
So he asked how many RAF aircraft have gone from RAF Akoteri to Israel, and they told him 48. So, it’s not that we’re not trusted. In fact, they’d love it if we got stuff wrong because then they’d probably take an interest, and then they’d expose us as being bad journalists, but they can’t do that. So, the way that the establishment media deal with us is not by trying to catch us out because they can’t really, or I mean, every human gets some stuff wrong, but we haven’t been caught out yet. The way they deal with us is just to completely ignore us. And it surprised me in this situation, particularly because the presidents on both sides of the Cypriot border made comments.
And I thought, okay, they ignore us all the time, but the fact that there’s massive protests and the fact that both presidents, it’s being talked about at that level, you would think, but again, nothing happened. And to be honest with you, it happens every single time with stories we do at Declassified. Like I did a story a couple of years ago about how the UK supported the coup in the South American country of Bolivia in 2019. That created a diplomatic kafuffle. The ambassador was called in, it was on the front page of all the Bolivian newspapers, and it’s never been mentioned by a single mainstream media outlet, even though it was at that level. So, it’s what I call, well not me, but many people call propaganda by omission. The way the establishment media brainwashes the population is not to outright lie.
Most of the time, they do that too, but most of the time, that’s not the principal technique of propaganda. The principal technique is just to leave out all the information that would help you really understand what was going on. This is so clear that it’s in the public interest for this information to be reported by the media. The fact that we’re sending military aircraft to Israel, the fact that Israeli military jets are landing in the UK, all this stuff. But anyone who reads the newspapers, anyone who watches the BBC or ITV, even Channel 4, would never ever know this has happened. So that’s the vast majority of the UK. And that’s how history is written, unfortunately. This whole story I’m talking about will not enter the history books.
AA: Do you think that there is a gap between what the UK government is revealing and what they’re actually doing? Are they hiding something?
MK: Well, they’re revealing little bits because we’re forcing them to, we are, by reporting. So, interestingly, all the stories I’ve described, they’ve initially not wanted to give information. Then, I’ve found other ways of getting the information through flight tracker websites, through different sources. And then they’ve said, okay, well, we’re going to have to now come back and give you the information. That’s what they’ve done. But they’ve still only given little bits and bobs. For example, we don’t know what was on those 48 aircraft that are going to Tel Aviv.
AA: I’m really interested to know why would the UK send a spy aircraft to Tel Aviv? What do they want to know?
MK: It’s a very good question. And none of it really makes sense. Like firstly, they announced they were going to do spy missions, but then I asked again to go back to that dynamic where I ask and they don’t give it, then I publish it and then they maybe come back with some more information. But I asked initially, how many spy flights are you making? Because they announced they were making some spy flights, but you would think maybe one a week or something. And then I looked, I found how many they were doing. They were doing more than one a day. And they were six-hour flights over Gaza. And they said publicly, this is only to deal with hostages. We want to help find the hostages.
I’m like, there’s only two British hostages that are with Hamas. Why would you need to run maybe often two six-hour spy flights over Gaza to help the Israelis find two hostages? Number one, the Israelis completely control Gaza in all sorts of ways. They’re on the ground in Gaza. The idea that the RAF can find information that the Israelis can’t is preposterous, and the sheer quantity, 65, indicates something else is going on. But again, we don’t know, and there’s huge amounts of secrecy. And I think, hopefully, if we lived in a just world, it would all come out in an investigation by the ICC because the ministers in charge of the UK military should be questioned. There are flagrant war crimes happening pretty much every day for six months, and we have evidence that the UK military is involved in material ways.
They should be questioning Grant Shapps, who’s the Secretary of Defense now. They should be questioning Rishi Sunak.
AA: Well, they should be questioning Rishi Sunak and everyone else. And we know for a fact that there is a genocide in Gaza right now. There’s starvation used as a weapon of war. There are more than 40,000 people killed, half of them maybe children, 70% women and children, over 90% are civilians. And the situation is so bleak, people are dying. So if we find out eventually after questioning that the UK was actually sending military support to Israel and this military support was used to kill us, to kill the Palestinians, what do you think should happen?
MK: Well, what should happen is they should investigate the ministers, the ICC, and they should put them on trial. That’s what they’ve done. They put out an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the invasion of Ukraine, which is way, way… The crimes committed in Ukraine have been bad, but they’re not on the same order of what they’ve been doing in Gaza. So, they should have issued an arrest warrant already. The fact that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, has not done that is an outrage. Because…
AA: Arrest warrant against who?
MK: Netanyahu, Yoav Galant, and everyone else in that regime, because they are, and I would say Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Rishi Sunak, Grant Shapps, because if you don’t do that, there’s no deterrent.
AA: So you really want the ICC to issue an arrest warrant against Rishi Sunak?
MK:Yes.
AA: Why?
MK: Because, well, first of all, they should investigate. And my hunch is they will find that he had awareness of, firstly, the crimes that were being committed in Gaza. Secondly, that he was given material support. He is an accomplice to a genocide. The law is quite straightforward on that. If you give material support to a genocide, you can be put on trial, and you should be. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that no Western leader has ever been put on trial at the ICC. And the only people that are put on trial are official enemies of the West and African dictators, often who have done bad things. But there’s no deterrent for the West to support what we’re seeing in Gaza. And it will happen again unless a deterrent is put in place.
These people need to know that there is some punishment for supporting genocide and supporting war crimes. And I can’t think of a more open and shut case than what’s going on in Gaza. Everyone knows that there’s multiple daily violations of the Geneva Conventions. They’re advertising it. You talked about starvation as a weapon of war. That contravenes the Geneva Convention.
AA: You know, Matt, I’m reluctant to say this, but in Gaza, some of the Gazans believe that the UK is interested in this war because, as many of you already know, there are huge wells of gas in Gaza, the Gaza shores. And Israel is really interested in taking this gas. And some people say that Rishi Sunak himself is interested in this business. What do you say to that?
MK: I mean, I don’t know. My personal take is that I don’t think that that is that much of a concern for the UK state. I don’t know about Rishi Sunak personally, but I don’t actually think he makes many decisions on this stuff. I think this is made by entrenched interests in the state. And I think much more a reason that the UK supports Israel in such a loyal way is that actually the Israel lobby in this country. I don’t know.
AA: We will talk a lot about the Israel lobby later.
MK: I think geopolitically or corporate profit-making ways, Israel is not that important to the UK, in my opinion.
AA: So why is all of this support to Israel?
MK: Well, we have an insanely powerful Israel lobby in this country. Insanely. And yet for a long time, people talked about it more now, but for a long time, you weren’t” allowed to talk about it. And that meant that it ran wild. To give you an example, I’ll just quote someone who’s not of my political persuasion and is from a completely different world to me, but a former foreign minister who was Minister for the Americas from 2016 to 2019, called Sir Alan Duncan. He wrote his memoirs a couple of years back, and there’s a quote in that where he says, “the Israelis think they control the UK Foreign Office, and they do”. So that’s a former foreign minister saying they control the Foreign Office. Now he said that because he was, Theresa May wanted to make him foreign minister for the Middle East in 2016, when he was eventually made minister for the Americas.
But it’s interesting why he wasn’t made minister for the Middle East. So, Boris Johnson proposed it, May okayed it. And then there was a massive attack on May and Boris Johnson’s decision by Conservative Friends of Israel, which is an Israel lobby group. It doesn’t disclose its funders but claims 80% of MPs are members. And they called up Theresa May, the Prime Minister, the most powerful political figure in Britain, democratically elected, and said, you can’t appoint Alan Duncan foreign minister for the Americas [for the Middle East – error – ID] because of his position on Palestine. His position on Palestine is just basic. It’s actually the position of the UK government, which is that we support a two-state solution. They got to get rid of the settlements, blah, blah, blah. It’s not radical position. But Theresa May got that phone call.
I think it was from either Eric Pickles or Stuart Polak, who were two of the senior figures in the Conservative Friends of Israel. She said, okay, we’re not going to give you the job for minister for the Middle East. We’re going to give you the job. And there’s a funny bit in that memoir, actually, where Alan Duncan’s outraged that the Israel lobby can overrule the decision of the British Prime Minister. And he goes and talks to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and says, ‘Boris, this is crazy.’ But maybe we can think of a way around it. Why don’t we say, ‘I’ll take on the Middle East brief, but we won’t include Israel and Palestine in the brief’? Which is a crazy idea because basically they’re trying to find a way around of getting around the Israel lobby.
So, you see who’s in control here. Anyway, they say, ‘No, that won’t work.’ And then Alan Duncan, who wasn’t made minister for the Middle East. It came out subsequently in an Al Jazeera documentary called The Lobby, that an Israeli diplomat was actually working out a plan to, quote unquote, destroy him. And so that gives you a taste of how powerful the Israel lobby is in this country. And they destroy anyone who speaks up for Palestine.
AA: But yet the Western media, the British media, seems to be determined to ignore the Israeli lobby. And even anyone who mentions about the Israeli lobby might get into trouble. They might be accused of anti-Semitism. So, I want to ask you, what does the Israeli lobby mean to you? And do you think that there is an Israeli lobby in the UK?
MK: Of course. And it’s interesting you bring that up because I just mentioned that memoir by a former foreign minister about his time at the UK Foreign Office. And he says the Israelis control the foreign office. You would think that maybe that would interest the mainstream media. That quote has never, ever appeared in the mainstream media. Can you imagine if it was Russia, if a former foreign minister said, oh yeah, the Russians control the foreign office? It’d be on the front page of every paper. But the mainstream media won’t touch the Israel lobby. And that’s why, in my opinion, why it’s out of control. Because you can’t talk about it because there are various impediments. They’ll attack you as an anti-Semite or whatever it is.
But to go to your question of what do I think it is, it’s not mysterious. Many, many countries have lobbies in this country. Like particularly powerful ones are Gulf ones, like Saudi, Oman, UAE. They all have institutions and put resources towards trying to work the political discourse in the UK in favor of those countries. Like the Saudis pay for MPs all the time to go to Riyadh to meet with Mohammed bin Salman or whoever it is.
AA: So if I say that now in the UK there is a Saudi lobby in the government, does that make me anti-Muslim?
MK: No, of course not.
AA: So why if we say that there is…
MK: Well, no, that’s how they control, that’s what they need. So, because the Israel lobby is out of control, they need a deterrent to stop people speaking out about it because the Israel lobby doesn’t want to be exposed. So, a very, very powerful deterrent is people don’t want to talk about the phrase Israel lobby because they’ll get accused of being anti-Semite, which is not a nice thing. No one wants to be accused of that, and it works. There’s no truth to it. It’s a propaganda technique. It’s a way of guiding the discourse away from discussions that you don’t want to be had, but we need to have that discussion now. And we need to have it in an unashamed way because it’s, in my opinion, the major reason that the UK is providing material support to a genocide is not because it’s in our state’s interest.
I don’t think our politicians are making decisions at all times based on the interests of the British public. I think they’re making them sometimes on the interests of the Israeli state. And as that showed in the case of Alan Duncan, when a foreign power overruled the decision of the British Prime Minister about who to appoint as a minister, that’s outrageous. And we need to really… That proves in itself, and there are many, many other examples that the situation is out of control.
Another major, major scandal, which was inflamed by the Israel lobby, was the antisemitism crisis during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. That was a partnership between the Israel lobby and also various sections of the British establishment that wanted to get rid of him. It wasn’t just the Israel lobby, but the Israel lobby was a major part of it. And that and Brexit were the two main reasons that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t become British Prime Minister. So, this is really serious interference in British democracy that we have. And we need to take it head-on and not be scared. And I do think, to be honest with you, I think something has changed. At Declassified, we were the only ones really talking and investigating the Israel lobby before the genocide. But I’ve seen a lot more people have courage now to… Like you said, some people didn’t even want to use the phrase. Maybe some people still don’t want to even use the phrase. But that is part of the way they control the debate.
If you’re scared to even mention something which is clearly the case, then you’ve got massive problems. So, we need to speak openly about it, and we need to say it is extraordinarily powerful. It’s not just like a lobby, like an Oman lobby or a Brazil lobby; it’s much, much more powerful. It has… the way they work, and you can be specific about it because it’s not a really an amorphous system; there are very specific institutions. The primary ones are Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel, neither of whom reveal their funders, but you can guess who their funders are; it’s not Oxfam.
AA: Talk about the Israeli lobby. What does the lobby mean? I mean, does it fund politicians?
MK: This is what I’m saying. Yeah, it does. So that’s how they do it. So, Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel, the way they work is to cultivate the politicians from early in their careers. So, when they join Parliament, they take them on expenses-paid trips to Israel. And in fact, I found that during the Gaza attack in 2021, I did a story at that time; Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. I looked into the expenses, or sorry, the donations to all the ministers in his cabinet. And a third of Boris Johnson’s cabinet had received funding from Israel lobby groups or Israel itself. And it’s all early in their careers. So, Boris Johnson was paid by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to go to Israel. And Labour Friends of Israel…
AA: This could be a very big story for the media to talk about. Have they written about it?
MK: No, no, the media generally follow the priorities of the state. And the state wants the media to investigate Russian interference, which does exist as well, but it’s not even anywhere near what the Israeli interference is. So, you get millions of stories about Russian interference, a lot of them bullshit, to be totally honest with you. Some of them true, I guess, and China now. But there’s no incentive for the media to look at the Israel lobby, because firstly, it’ll get attacked for the reasons we’ve talked about. And secondly, the state’s not behind you on that. The state doesn’t want to be exposed. I sent a tweet the other day because David Cameron was celebrating that he was cracking down on Chinese interference or cracking down on China after they’d tried to hack into different government computers.
And I said, well, that’s fine. Crack down on whoever you want. But why don’t you crack down on Israel? They are interfering in our democracy. They’re basically overruling decisions made by the Prime Minister. We can’t allow that. That’s an attack on our sovereignty.
AA: But why is the UK allowing it? Do you think that it’s in Britain’s interest to be a strong ally of Israel, After a genocide?
MK: No. I think it’s not. There’s two arguments for why. This goes for the US as well. Why do the US and the UK support Israel so loyally? One is that it has a geopolitical function and an imperial function. It’s a little imperial outpost in the Middle East. And the other one is that the political system has been captured by the Israeli state to work in the Israeli state’s interests through various lobby groups in the US, ones like AIPAC here.
They were friends with Israel because they were friends with Israel. I think that the former one that serves an imperial function was maybe true for the early part of Israel’s history. In fact, there’s a quote from the former British Governor of Jerusalem where he says, this is before Israel was created, but they were saying, why do the British support Zionism? And they say, we want to create a Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism. So, the idea was that Arab nationalism could kick out the Brits and kick out the imperial forces. And they needed a little Jewish state. Ulster is what they call Northern Ireland. So, they needed a little Jewish state to maintain their supremacy of the whole Middle East. And so, I think that was true for a while, but now I don’t think that’s the case, and…
John Mearsheimer, the academic, and Stephen Walt, his colleague; they wrote a book called The Israel Lobby. This is about the US, but I think it goes here where they say that they’re not leftists or anything. They’re realpolitik people. They’re called realists. But they want to look out for US interests. And they say it’s not in the US interest anymore to have this state. And the only reason we state that we basically sponsor, and they say the only reason they do it is because the Israel lobby is out of control. And they buy the politicians. And I think that’s the same thing here. And so to go to your… I think it’s not even just neutral, it’s negative for the British and the Americans now.
They’ve got an absolutely out of control state committing a genocide. They’re turning the whole of the Arab world and further afield against the West. I think this is a turning point in world history, and they won’t pull the plug because the Israel lobby is too powerful.
AA: Which parties and politicians are funded by the Israeli lobby in the UK?
MK: Well, as I say, well, Britain, the oligarchy in Britain is run through two parties, one called the Conservatives and one called Labour. They’re the only ones that can form a government, really, and have formed a government since the Second World War, apart from the Liberal Democrats, who were in a coalition for a while. But… so they’re the ones that the Israelis focus on.
AA: It’s illegal to receive funding from a foreign…
MK: No, it’s not. It’s not. Saudis do it all the time as well. But it’s not illegal. You have to declare it. But the Labour Friends of Israel was exposed. So, in that Al Jazeera documentary, they filmed this Israeli diplomat saying to a Labour MP who was, I think, chair of Labour Friends of Israel, he said, we’ve got that we’ve got that money from the Embassy for you. It’s a lot of money. It’s a million pounds.
AA: Wow.
MK: So I mean, no one’s ever found out what that million pounds was for I think someone I think someone official said it was for trips, but those trips cost about two and a half grand each, so I don’t know how they’ve got a million pounds out of that.
But anyway, so there is a direct evidence that the Israeli state is funding Labour Friends of Israel, and you can imagine that they’re funding them anyway. The fact they don’t reveal their funders, the fact they have all this money, the fact that they work closely with the Embassy. So that in terms of who they’re funding. As I said, 30 percent of Boris Johnson’s cabinet, it’s about the same for Rishi Sunak’s cabinet. I think 37 percent of Labour MPs have been funded or are associated with Labour Friends of Israel. They pay for them to go. Wes Streeting was actually there last year with Labour Friends of Israel. They went on. Labour Friends of Israel sent a solidarity mission to Israel about two months ago at the height of the genocide with Margaret Hodge, Ruth Anderson, who’s a Labour Lord and also CEO of Index on Censorship, and some others as well.
So they fund loads of them. There’s like there’s a long list, including senior figures in the Labour cabinet. Like Rachel Reeves is, I think, the chair of Labour Friends of Israel. So, they’ve infested it and no one talks about it. No. And we need to talk about it because we need to change it.
AA: The concept of Labour Friends of Israel is perplexing to me because, you know, the base of the Labour Party is very pro-Palestine. Most of the people who I know from the Labour Party are pro-Palestine. But yet we see the leaders of the Labour Party very different. So, and we have this Labour Friends of Israel, and we know that the Labour Party identifies itself as anti-racist party. And yet we have Labour Friends of Israel. Why should there be a Labour Friends of Israel, especially after this genocide? And what is the stated purpose of the Labour Friends of Israel? I’ve heard you’ve done a lot of research on that.
MK: Yeah, it’s a good, it’s a very good question. In my opinion, it shouldn’t exist because it’s like, it’s no different to having Labour Friends of Apartheid South Africa in the 80s. You wouldn’t have that. Israel is an apartheid state. It’s been designated such by the main human rights organizations in the US and the UK, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, not fringe organizations. It has basically been for decades criticized by every human rights group for major violations of human rights. There’s no there’s no way that that should have that support for that state in any institutionalized form should exist in any progressive party.
So, yes, it shouldn’t exist. Number one, even more serious is no organization like Labour Friends of Israel should exist and be allowed to not divulge their funders because that’s an attack on democracy. We have a right to know who is funding our politicians, because, OK, I don’t really think that our politicians should be taking money from any foreign states. But if they if they declare it, there is an argument for it. There’s no there’s no argument for taking money from an organization when we don’t even know who’s funding that organization and therefore funding other politicians. So, they should they should be shut down, should be shut down. It should be it’s an absolute embarrassment. And that’s why we’ve run a campaign about the Labour Friends of Israel revealing its funders.
But we’re a small organization. If the mainstream media did their job, it would flip overnight. It would flip overnight. Interestingly, I did ask what the question you’re asking me. I asked Jeremy Corbyn when I interviewed him a couple of years ago. I said, do you think it’s right that Labour Friends of Israel should exist? And he actually said, well, I don’t mind the idea that you have friends of different countries within the Labour Party, but they should reveal their funders. But I don’t, I’d go further than him and say, actually, if it’s an apartheid state that is practicing flagrant and daily violations of human rights and the genocide, but even before that, like there’s no place for that in any kind of progressive party.
And actually, if we lived in a democratic society with a real progressive party, it would be a preposterous idea to have any kind of affiliation to Israel in any way. But we don’t have either of those things. We don’t have a proper democratic system, and the Labour Party is definitely not a progressive party. I’ll just say it also goes for the Saudis because the Saudis, it’s a dictatorship run by a crime family that subscribe to an extremist form of Islam called Wahhabism. And yet they fund loads of Labour ministers as well. No progressive party should be funded by a Wahhabi dictatorship as well. So, but again that’s allowed to happen and not talked about. And in fact, Corbyn said the biggest rebellion against him as leader was when he put a vote in the House of Commons to stop UK support for the Saudi war on Yemen. And he said that was the biggest rebellion of Labour MPs that there was, which is outrageous.
And he said it even shocked him. So we have a massive problem with British democracy, fundamental, and a media problem. And that, for me, is the reason why the Israel lobby has got so outsized, because we haven’t got checks in place to stop that happening. And we haven’t got a mainstream media exposing it. So, in those conditions, it goes out of control. And that’s why you see the anti-Semitism crisis under Jeremy Corbyn is why you see a very, very, well, basically zero coverage of the UK role in the genocide in Gaza.
AA: So these Israeli lobbies and pro-Israel groups have been trying for years to push the conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. So, I would like to ask you, Matt, what does Zionism mean to you?
MK: Yeah, well, Zionism, for me, is not a mysterious concept. It’s a settler colonial ideology, which tries to legitimize the theft of territory and a country from its indigenous people and give it to imported foreigners. And there’s a long line of settler colonial ideologies which justify that stuff. I’ve looked a lot at Latin America and North America, and what the British and the Spanish and the Portuguese did in the Americas is very similar. And they had similar ideologies, like Manifest Destiny in North America, where they said that God gave us the right to civilize this land. And in Latin America, it was about the civilizing mission; we’re going to take Christianity and convert the savages. And so, Zionism goes in that same vein, the thousand-year-old claims to territory. And so, to me, it’s not religious; it’s a nationalism, it’s called Jewish nationalism, but it’s not obviously ascribed to by all Jewish people.
And it’s a brutal settler colonial ideology, which stole, which ethnically cleansed 800,000 indigenous people, warehoused them in little bits of territory, made the rest of the indigenous people that are allowed to stay have to be a permanent minority, because otherwise it won’t carry on being a Jewish state. So, you have to have various insurance mechanisms to make sure that that happens. A constant is what they call it; they call it a threat, isn’t it? A demographic threat that the Palestinians might outbreed them. So, it’s horrendous. It’s a horrendous idea. It’s a preposterous idea as well. And there were a lot of Jewish people that were against Zionism. I was looking recently, actually, at some of them, and Walter Benjamin, who I’m a big fan of, he was a Marxist sort of theorist on art and culture.
He was against Zionism and Albert Einstein because they predicted what has happened, which is that it turns into extreme nationalism and extreme Jewish supremacism, which is what you see with the Netanyahu administration. So, Zionism to me is not complicated; it’s just that it’s a boring and brutal settler-colonial ideology that legitimizes the theft of land from indigenous people. Unfortunately, it’s a been a catastrophic disaster for the Palestinian people because they had nothing to do with the events that are often used to sort of justify the creation of Israel, which is the Holocaust, the Nazi holocaust. That was nothing to do with the Palestinians; that was a European crime, and also, anti-Semitism was traditionally a European problem because anti-Semitism mostly comes out of Christianity.
The Jews lived a lot better in the Middle East than they did in Europe for many centuries. And now all this history of European anti-Semitism is projected onto the Palestinians, and we’re made to think that they’re all rabid anti-Semites and that they resist Israel because they’re anti-Semites, when of course the resistance of the Palestinians is about resisting a settler-colonial regime which oppresses them. Any group would do that to any other group, would resist that. It’s not a religious war, it’s an oppressed and oppressor war. So, I mean I haven’t also been to Palestine twice, and you see what Zionism means on the total negation of the human spirit in every way. It’s about division, it’s about control, and it’s about separating people based on religious or racial characteristics.
It’s just hell, its hell, and it separates people apart, and that’s the tragedy of it. It’s like Jews and Muslims are cousins, they’re not enemies, but Zionism needs them to be enemies to operate. And the hellscape of the West Bank, and you’re from Gaza, so you know I’ve never been to Gaza; they wouldn’t let me in. But it was actually quite a profound experience for me going to the West Bank and staying there. I definitely wasn’t the same when I came back because when you see apartheid up close and the results of a settler-colonial ideology like Zionism up close, you understand that it doesn’t get much worse than that; it’s just awful. So, I’ve got nothing good to say about Zionism.
If you actually think about what Zionism is and what they did, you can’t just build a state on someone else’s land. I honestly don’t, I can’t get my head around it. I think that the reason that people don’t take Zionism head-on is because they’re scared of being accused of being anti-Semitic, but that’s not that’s not the case.
AA: But if you support Zionism in any way, do you think there is a justification for that? Is the support for Zionism justified in any way possible?
MK: In my opinion, no, because it’s like saying, is there any justification for supporting Manifest Destiny, which was the ideology they used to wipe out the Native Americans in North America? No, I don’t think there’s any justification for it.
AA: Some people would say that they support Zionism not because they want to annihilate an entire people, the Palestinian people, but because they support the idea that the Jewish people should have self-determination and serenity.
MK: I think that when they would talk about Zionism, honestly, back then, Jews were oppressed and treated brutally for centuries in the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, and then obviously the Holocaust. Through that whole tragic history, yes, I can understand why some people would come to the idea that we need our own country, because otherwise we’re going to be… Okay, that’s fine. The problem I have with Zionism is to locate that in Palestine. Put it somewhere where there’s no people. They were talking about putting it in Argentina, out in the countryside where there’s no people.
If it was as it was created in 1948, why not put it in Germany? Why put it in Palestine? Their argument was, oh, well, we have the right to that because we lived there 3,000 years ago. But to me, that’s for kids. You can’t use that argument. I think that there’s two sides to it. Zionism, in terms of the idea that going back to Zion, yeah, no, there’s no justification for it. There’s no way that it could have been any for Palestinians because they needed a Jewish supremacist state. They wanted a Jewish state, which means there has to be a majority of Jews. It was predicated on the expulsion of the indigenous population. It wasn’t a mistake, which some Zionists say, well, we could have had a binational…
That was never going to happen. So I don’t think there is a justification for it. But I also think we need to talk about Zionism, the conflation of Zionism and Jews explicitly as an anti-Semitic idea. And everyone on the right, all Zionists do that now because it’s in their interest. In fact, they often substitute the word Jews for Israelis. They say that when Hamas did their attack on Jews on October 7th. No, it was a massacre of Israelis, which is a different thing. And yeah, so it’s a mess. And I also think with the anti-Semitism, the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism to destroy Palestine’s solidarity is also anti-Semitic as well, because firstly, it conflates Jews with Israel, but also it makes anti-Semitism much harder to fight, because anti-Semitism does exist, of course, and is a problem.
But if you constantly muddy the water by accusing everyone who speaks up for Palestine of being anti-Semite, it’s very, very hard to, number one, focus on the real anti-Semites. And number two, it makes people switch off now. If now people have heard so much bullshit about Jeremy Corbyn being anti-Semite or leftists being anti-Semites who support Palestine, that they mostly when they hear that term now, they just think it’s a lie, which is a real problem because obviously anti-Semitism does exist, and we don’t want people to be switching off.
AA: And anti-Semitism is vile, and I hate those who are racist because anti-Semitism is racism, and we are all against anti-Semitism. We are all against racism. And I think we all, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, we should be fighting all kinds of racism, whether it was anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. But we never hear anything about Islamophobia in this country. We only hear about anti-Semitism.
MK: Exactly. Well, they call it now a hierarchy of racism. Hierarchy of racism, which is true. I mean, it’s so clear. You can get away with saying anything you want about Muslims. In fact, for me, it’s quite interesting.
AA: It’s the same thing, Matt, we were seeing it in the media. Now all the media focuses on the 150 Israeli hostages in Gaza, but they never talked about the thousands and thousands of Palestinian hostages who have been imprisoned by Israel for the past 75 years. We are talking about 80% of the Palestinian people have been or experienced a prison in Israel. We are talking about minors who are systematically detained in Israeli prisons. But we never heard that the media talks about these hostages, these imprisoned by Israel. They only talk about the Israeli hostages. Why? Because there is hierarchy of solidarity with the oppressed people or with the victims of human rights violations worldwide. We’re seeing it at many levels in our lives.
MK: Well, Palestinians are the most dehumanized group, I think, probably in the world. People, I don’t know, there have been so many years of media dehumanization that people are desensitized to. Can you imagine if it was reversed and you had the Palestinian Muslim population in Palestine and there was a Jewish population of 2 million Jews in a concentration camp, 15,000 kids being bombed and killed from the air? You would see a completely different reaction.
AA: I would have seen armies coming from all over Europe and America.
MK: Exactly! But why? Everyone in that part of the world is the same. They’re all human beings. They all have the same rights. They all have the same DNA. It’s so clear with this genocide that how there is a hierarchy of solidarity, as you say. It’s one of the most sick things about it that we don’t have the outrage. That’s basically because Palestinians are not white and they’re not Muslim. It’s very, very easy for people just to dismiss that they are.
AA: Why is there a lot of hate for Muslims and Islam in the West?
MK: Good question. Well, I think there’s…
AA: And Arabs as well.
MK: I think partly it’s got worse since 9/11, like the whole context.
AA: But even before that, we have seen in Hollywood how they portray Arabs and Muslims: camels, deserts, savages, many, many, many women. You know, when I first came to the UK and I met with someone here in the UK, and I told her that I am an Arab, they said, how many wives do you have? Do you live in the desert? Do you have camels? And at the same time, she also asked me if I have private airplanes. So we have a lot of demonisations of the Arabs and stereotypes about the Arabs, and it’s been prevalent in the media, in the Western media and in Hollywood for many years, even before the 9th of 11th, the 11th of September. Where did this come from and why it is rampant?
MK: Well, I think it’s like Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, isn’t it? That it’s also because I think it’s a function of imperialism that when the Brits and others were taking over the Middle East like that, various stereotypes became established, which were not, which presented Arabs in a way and Muslims in a way that would justify controlling them. Because all imperial ideologies, if you go and take control of somewhere, you can’t say this person, this culture is nice or on the same level as us because then you’re saying, okay, well, what’s the justification for going and dominating people that have the same sophistication as you? So you need to infantilize them, dehumanize them, say they’re backwards, say they’re savages. So, all those, they did that in the Arab world.
I do think though that it has got a lot worse since 9-11. I think that the whole of the propaganda system after 9/11 presented the Muslim population as a massive threat, but I also think that it’s partly to do with Zionism as well because the Israel lobby that we’re talking about, it’s in their interest to present Islam as a massive threat to the West. You see it with Netanyahu, right? They say we’re fighting your war. If we don’t win, you’re going to see these Muslim terrorists on the streets of London and you’re going to… So, it’s a major part of Zionism is projecting this idea that Muslims are backwards, that they’re savages, that they’re terrorists. I think that there’s a lot, and you see that in very insidious ways with the Zionist lobby.
They don’t do it explicitly, but there’s constant repetition of tropes, and they need to present the Palestinians as savages and backwards and religious fundamentalists because they need to justify what they’re doing, which is genocide. You know, and as I say, it’s the same through all of history.
AA: A few months ago you, Mohamed Elkord and Hala and Nina and I did a show here in the same place and I remember you asked us a question back then what do you think of the international law and you know I think at that time. I gave you a kind of a positive response about international law but now after I have seen what happened after all six months of genocide after the UN Security Council passing a resolution calling for a ceasefire and Israel is not responding the UN called for a ceasefire not responding the international law and the Geneva Convention and the Geneva Convention on the genocide and all of that and Israel is not responding. And there’s no way in which we can pressure Israel to stop its genocide against the Palestinian people. So, I want to ask you should anyone anymore take the international law or the international legitimacy seriously?
MK: No, I think that this was the litmus test wasn’t it? I mean, as I mentioned earlier, like I don’t think Israel could be any more blatant about its violations of international law in this genocide. This is, from the start, you know, Yoav Galant, the Defence Minister, went on TV straight after and said, we’re going to withdraw water and electricity from a population of 2. 3 million people because we’re dealing with human animals. That is a collective punishment, which is outlawed in international law. He explicitly said that on TV and he said no, there’s been no arrest warrant for him and they did it of course as well when you’re seeing the results of it now, like with the imposed famine.
So, I think that I’ve definitely changed my opinion on a lot of stuff, but international law as well, because I don’t think you could get a more blatant case as what we’re seeing. And also, the violations of targeting civilians with the bomb air campaign as well; you can’t kill 15,000 children as if they’re collateral damage. You have to be targeting them and you have to be targeting families of course, and they targeted your family. You know none of these are mistakes and the fact that no one— and that’s obviously a major violation of humanitarian law— no one’s been arrested, no one’s had an arrest warrant issued.
AA: No, they are received in the Congress now and they’re celebrated.
MK: Exactly, and get more arms. And get more arms to do more of it. So, the whole system has been exposed, and I do think that is true in a way that is unprecedented. I think they’ve smashed the system to get this done. They’ve all the nice theories and nice academic seminars where they talk about international human rights law and responsibility to protect. It’s all been exposed as a fraud. I always thought it was kind of a fraud, but this has exposed it. If they’re not going to do anything about this, then they’re not going to do anything about anything if it’s not in their interest. For me, it shows that the ICC is a thread in the imperial tapestry. It’s set up as a way of lawfare against opponents of the Western Empire, the US Empire and its allies. So it’s fine and we set it up to bring to justice our enemies if they do bad things, but we never, ever will apply it to ourselves. And we got a taste of that with the war in Iraq, right? Where Bush and Blair invaded Iraq in 2003, they didn’t even get a second UN resolution. Kofi Annan, who was then head of the world, he used the word it was illegal. And they’ve never had a day in court, never had a day in court. So, it’s an illusion, it’s an illusion which works nicely. You can write nice books about it in universities.
You can feel nice about it when you’re talking about if you’re working in civil society and you talk about international law. But in reality, it doesn’t exist. It’s the same with the free press. All these things work up to a certain point if you don’t push too hard. It’s the same with this Julian Assange, which I shouldn’t— that’s a whole other Pandora’s box to bring up. But it’s the same with the free press. We think we do have a free press. But if you start pushing too hard and taking it seriously, you realize the freedoms you thought you had are actually illusions. And it’s the same with the critical media. I’ll finish with that. Like the work we did on Cyprus really shows, a lot of its open source. The fact that it’s not being covered shows we don’t have a free press either.
AA: And the UK government has been accusing those who protest every Saturday for Palestine, for human rights, for ending the war, for stopping the killing of the children, for stopping the starvation. The UK government is calling them extremists. So, what does that say about the British government? Do we really have free speech or human rights in this country?
MK: No, we don’t. And I think that we’re going somewhere quite dark in the UK, and maybe globally, like that the system is failing the majority. And they’re having to basically plaster up different wounds that are coming. One of them is like, they don’t like democracy. Like, that’s what they really fear is, as you say, people coming out and protesting against the government’s support for genocide is something that in a democracy would be welcomed.
And also, there’ll be avenues for that public to change policy, but we don’t see those avenues. So, we can’t change policy. We’re told we if we come out in the streets, we’re extremists. And it’s because an oligarchy is trying to find ways to push back against their power being questioned or and opposed. And there will be legislation, and they’re talking about legislation that’s to really back up this attack, this authoritarian attack on the general public. And I think that will get more and more that way. And we need to fight back because really what this whole Gaza genocide has shown in the UK context in terms of the support for us is that we don’t live in a democracy. We have politicians that voted against the ceasefire, even though the majority of the population was in favour of a ceasefire.
We have a government which is arming a country that a majority of the population doesn’t want to arm. And yet we can’t get our elected representatives to reflect the will of the people. And that’s because Britain is not a democracy. So, what we need is to transform the system so the majority of people are, number one, informed and, number two, have avenues in which to change the policy and the pronouncements of their elected leaders. I think that there’s a realization that has come with the Gaza genocide that wasn’t there about what I’m talking about. I think people are starting to understand that all the shit I was told about living in a democracy with a free press that tells me the truth. People don’t believe it anymore.
And that’s an that’s an opportunity for us I mean, it’s it’s tragic what’s had to happen to kind of bring that about. But I think that we need to capitalize on it because the other thing is we can’t let the realisations and the awakenings that have been happening across the board, I think on a general level, be forgotten soon after the genocide ends because that has happened with previous attacks on Gaza. Well, I think you were probably in Gaza when this happened in 2008, 9, 14, 20, 21. They were so savage. A lot of those that I was, and there was quite a lot of outcry. And then I was like, OK, I’d say things like, OK, this has changed the game. Israel’s and then everyone would slowly, like a few months later, everyone would go back to how the same sort of thing.
Obviously, this is much more extreme what’s happened. So I don’t think that will happen again. But what we need to make sure is that that definitely doesn’t happen again, that people bottle their anger, bottle their awareness of what Israel is, because we’re talking it’s such an avalanche of evil that Israel has unleashed in Gaza. Like sometimes I look at old news articles from November and think, freaking hell, that was five months ago and they were murdering thousands of kids. And you’ve even forgotten some of the individual cases, you know, so many atrocities. So, we need to, we need to just make sure that everyone moves forward and doesn’t lose this anger, this awareness, and this this awakening about what Israel is, because Israel has to be boycotted, divested, sanctioned, and isolated in a way that South Africa was. And it’s what Israel does to the Palestinians is even worse than what the South African apartheid state did to the blacks of South Africa.
AA: Well, we have we will have general elections here in the UK very soon. Who do you think should people vote for? And the polls say that the Labour Party might win. Whether the Labour Party wins or the Conservative or other parties win, will that make any difference when it comes to the foreign policy of the UK?
MK: In fact, it’s quite interesting what I’m talking about. I think that the British political system, I mean, is an oligarchy. Oligarchy is when like a small coterie of people run the whole thing and they do it through the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. And I think that the two-party system is a massive benefit to the oligarchy because it gives the illusion that there is a choice, but yet their interests are protected whoever gets elected. And that’s been the case for many, many decades. That’s not like a new thing. So, my belief is that we need to smash the two-party system. And if and that that doesn’t mean we have to get into power, but it means we put pressure on the two-party system from outside the two-party system, and the right understand that. So, if you they have an example with UKIP, which was a right-wing party that formed to try and pressure the Conservatives over Brexit And they basically informed … they were never going to form a government, but they formed and took so much support away from the Conservative Party that they forced a Brexit referendum, which they eventually won. So they transformed British politics without ever even getting into power, but by just forming.
So, I think we need that on the left. We need to put a deterrent in place that says you can’t support genocide. You can’t support arming and destroying this Yemen via the Saudis. You can’t do these things or and and still get our vote and give people another option, because we don’t have that now. I mean, the Green Party, I would probably vote for now, to be honest with you. They’re not far from perfect, but that they’re probably the most. Although if there were independents standing on the issue of Palestine, which is happening a lot, like Andrew Feinstein in Holborn, Leanne Mohammed in in Ilford, no in Wes Streeting’s constituency, isn’t it? I’d vote for them.
But I think that’s what needs to happen. I think we need to get out of the idea, get out of the mentality that we’re going to change things through the Labour Party, because the Labour Party is set up to stop that happening. And it was revealed during Jeremy Corbyn. So, I always thought this. And then when Jeremy Corbyn was elected, I was like, OK, maybe I was wrong. Maybe the Labour Party can be used for progressive goals because Jeremy Corbyn is a is as good politics and is a good man. But having seen what happened to him, I think now proves my original point in that they he was primarily destroyed by the Labour Party itself because it is not set up to allow someone like him to get anywhere near it.
And they would prefer the Tories to be in power than a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn. So, we need to smash up the two-party system. And I think that that is a prerequisite for us to really get progressive change in this country because it hamstrings the left that everyone puts so much energy into the Labour Party. And when that realization is had, we can put that energy somewhere else. And it’s the same for the media, to be honest with you. I think that the Guardian’s quite set performs a similar role in that people think, OK, well, we got a free press because we got the Guardian. But actually, the Guardian, again, which helped destroy Jeremy Corbyn when it comes to it, protects the system in the same way. So we need alternative media to create progressive change as well And this, I do think Gaza has been a game changer on all this stuff because when you have Keir Starmer, who’s the leader of the opposition, coming out and supporting withdrawing water and electricity from a million children, oh, you just think, well, flipping hell, man, we were in a bit of a pickle.
When you’ve had a conservative government that has for six months supported a genocide, it might have been different if we’d had an opposition that was opposing that policy, but we’ve had an opposition that has basically supported everything that the Conservatives have done. So the lack of democracy has facilitated British support for one of the worst crimes of the modern period. So, we need democracy now and we need to work out a way that that can be achieved, not through the Labour Party, because the Labour Party is the problem, it’s not the solution.
AA: We need democracy now. Thank you very much, Matt Kennard. It was a pleasure speaking to you again.
MK: Of course, thank you very much. Thanks, Ahmed.
