The UK’s neo-liberal New Labour regime happily lies in bed together with fascist Tel Aviv.

Snip:

UK prosecutors are colluding with Israeli embassy officials to classify protesters resisting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as terrorists and to imprison them on heavily politicized grounds, an investigation by The Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg showed.

“Documents released by the British government reveal that London has been coordinating with Israeli officials to prosecute protestors associated with activist group Palestine Action for disrupting the operations of Elbit Systems, which manufactures deadly weapons being used in the genocide in Gaza,” Klarenberg wrote.

The documents suggest that Israel has successfully lobbied the UK to abandon well-established legal standards in order to charge activists resisting Israel’s genocide under harsh counter-terror laws.

  • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    Why are so many different politicians and officials in so many different countries so keen to enable the mass murder of Gazans?

    I mean - yeah - military/industrial complex and Israeli lobbying and disinformation and Middle East destabilization and even that screechingly insane christian zionist armageddon thing - there are lots of ways that Israel coerces support for its patent evil. But even all of them added together don’t seem enough to explain the scale on which they’ve managed it, nor the range of different countries they’ve done it in.

    It’s as if we have a worldwide epidemic of contagious psychopathy, with Israel as the reservoir.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 days ago
      1. WANA has been a geopolitical significant region of the world throughout history. Empires had thrown hundreds of thousands of men and committed countless atrocities to secure this region.

      2. The peoples living within WANA are a lot more culturally, religiously, and linguistically similar than most people, including themselves, realize, which means political unity is very possible. And political unity has been achieved in WANA before.

      3. The center of WANA, the place which ties everything together and where the foundations of a global power can be build, is in Palestine.

      This is why the imperialists have sunk their teeth in Palestine and will not let go. Once the Zionist entity is no more, Western imperialist hold in their region will lessen. Without Western machinations which foster sectarian divides, these bitter divisions will be erased and similarities will be emphasized over differences. And from similarities comes social and cultural harmony, and from social and cultural harmony comes the natural convergence towards political unity, which will be expressed as a single regional organization, if not a singular state. Using the org/state as an instrument of power, the people of WANA can then rightfully leverage the strategic geography of WANA for their own ends instead of for the ends of outside actors.

      • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        That’s a much more detailed (impressively so) description of just what I was alluding to when I mentioned, as one common cause, “Middle East destabilization.”

        I long ago became, and remain, convinced that that’s the goal of a great deal of western policy in the region - that the process of undermining and even overthrowing stable governments (Mossadegh in Iran is a near perfect example) is deliberate and intended primarily just to keep the region unstable, since their wealth and cultural connections administered by strong, stable and widely supported governments would be a direct threat to western hegemony.

        It’s a conclusion I reached on my own though, and have fleshed out, to the small degree that I have, on my own. I’ve never before seen it expressed in academic terms or in that much detail, so thanks for that.

    • porcupine@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      3 days ago

      Europe didn’t need any of those things to support the extermination and colonization of the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific islands. This sort of behavior that “Western civilization” is built on.

    • shikitohno@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 days ago

      There’s the pretty clear and obvious reasons of self-enrichment and looking out for national/regional interests in terms of geopolitical, strategic and economic advantages to be gained by having a friendly power in the region, but it seems like there’s also a sunk cost they keep piling on in having to avoid confronting how wrong they’ve been.

      Virulent pro-Zionism and intolerance of questioning this seems to me to come in large part from a western sense of guilt and shame over having allowed the Holocaust to happen while western powers sat on the sidelines for way too long, and they have collectively overcompensated on this front since the end of WWII, blindly doing anything to say “We’re going to support the Jewish people going forward.” Doubling down on this now means that they can continue to convince themselves that this was the correct, morally justified choice, while withdrawing this unwavering support would mean they would eventually have to confront the question, “At what point did the Israelis and the Zionist project become evil?” Unfortunately for them, seriously grappling with this question would ultimately require admitting that this isn’t some recent development, but has been the case going back all the way to the very foundation of Israel, if not earlier. Without exceptional skills to manage this, admitting that the western powers have been materially aiding a genocide against one group of Semitic peoples to assuage their own guilt over having stood by to the point that the Nazis were able to advance an absolutely disgusting amount in their own revolting genocide against of the Jewish people (amongst many other groups in Europe), which almost no politician is willing to consider.

      “So, to make up for how we enabled the Nazis and collectively screwed millions of Jews, we’ve been supporting a Zionist project that has been carrying out international propaganda and genocide for almost 80 years, to such great success in their propaganda efforts that Goebbels would be taking notes from it,” is a hard pill to swallow. Instead of facing the facts, they double down on this and keep their heads in the sand when it comes to the horrors of the Zionist state and its aims.

      • WatDabney@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 days ago

        Mm… yeah.

        I’ve long assumed there was some guilt component involved for some of Israel’s international supporters (and particularly among Germans), but I could never quite work out how it could extend to supporting obvious genocide.

        I think this sunk cost idea has some merit, particulatly in light of the fact that having to ignore inconvenient facts in order to continue that support actually dates back at least to the bombing of the King David Hotel, so that’s actually 80+ years of sunk cost.

  • SnakeEyes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    3 days ago

    Summary of the article

    spoiler

    UK Prosecutors Collaborate With Israel to Persecute Anti-genocide Activists as ‘Terrorists’: Report

    UK prosecutors are colluding with Israeli embassy officials to classify protesters resisting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as terrorists and to imprison them on heavily politicized grounds, an investigation by The Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg showed.

    “Documents released by the British government reveal that London has been coordinating with Israeli officials to prosecute protestors associated with activist group Palestine Action for disrupting the operations of Elbit Systems, which manufactures deadly weapons being used in the genocide in Gaza,” Klarenberg wrote.

    The documents suggest that Israel has successfully lobbied the UK to abandon well-established legal standards in order to charge activists resisting Israel’s genocide under harsh counter-terror laws.

    A file released by the British government showed that Nicola Smith, the Head of International Law at Britain’s Attorney General’s Office, shared “contact details” for UK prosecutors and counter-terror investigators with Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to London, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, in August 2024.

    This allowed the Israeli deputy ambassador to promote the prosecution of 10 activists affiliated with Palestine Action, known as the “Filton 10,” who were imprisoned after raiding an Elbit factory in Filton, South West England.

    Three months after AGO officials provided the Israeli embassy with contact details of the officers investigating the activists behind the raid of the Filton facility, 10 more Palestine Action demonstrators involved in the action were arrested. Eight were charged and imprisoned under the same counterterror powers.

    The imprisoned activists are now known as the “Filton 18.”

    The mother of one of the imprisoned Filton 18 activists told The Grayzone that revelations of AGO officials collaborating with Israeli officials to prosecute her 21-year-old daughter Zoe made her “feel physically sick.”