Leak reveals UK lawyers, Israeli government planned ‘special unit’ to counter human rights reporting.
The Israeli Embassy in London
Anas Ambri reports in Mondoweiss on 1 December 2024:
On 10 August 2017, pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) approached the Embassy of Israel in London with a “pitch for business”: a proposal to setup “a rapid response unit to correct false narratives” regarding Israel.
According to the proposal, human rights organizations “such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, routinely publish material condemning Israeli government policy [in Palestine] as disproportionate and discriminatory”.
To counter this, Steven Kay QC and Joshua Kern from London’s 9 Bedford Row International (9BRI) were offering to work with UKLFI “as a response unit to counter” such reports, in order to “develop content capable of responding” to them, at a “granular, detailed, or item by item level”.
This proposal, as well as emails from UKLFI to officials within the Israeli Ministry of Justice, are part of a trove of documents leaked in a hack by a group that calls itself “Anonymous for Justice”. The dataset has since been published by the non-profit journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The documents show the level of coordination between UKLFI and the different organs of the Israeli government, despite recent denials by UKLFI of any links. As part of the proposal, barristers from 9BRI worked with UKLFI to submit briefs to the International Criminal Court (ICC), challenging its jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine.
The leaked documents show how legal advisors from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and top officials from the Ministry of Justice, provided detailed input to be incorporated into the submissions made by 9BRI’s barristers.