“Friends of Israel” – a review

JVL Introduction

When people try to raise the topic of the “Israel Lobby” almost anything they say invites dismissal with accusations of antisemitism.

It is Hil Aked’s great accomplishment to have written a full-length book on the topic which can’t be dismissed in this way, based as it is on solid research evidence.

Here in a review specially for JVL, Deborah Maccoby assesses its strengths and limitations.

Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity, by Hil Aked (Verso, 2023), 212 pp.

A review by Deborah Maccoby

You can order the book from Verso here

The topic of the “Israel Lobby” tends to be surrounded by taboos and mystification, because of fears of accusations of antisemitism. Friends of Israel aims to shine a cool, rational light upon the subject of the “Israel Lobby” in the UK and its fight against the BDS movement. The early chapters of the book explain the theoretic concepts underlying Friends of Israel, provide an overview of the global context and outline the history of the British Zionist movement; the author then goes on to examine in detail five different UK “arenas” in which the fight between the Israel Lobby and BDS takes place: Parliament; civil society and the cultural sphere; local government and the legal sphere; universities; and the media. To an extent, I think Friends of Israel succeeds in its aim of demystification; but I also have problems with the book. 

Friends of Israel is based in part on a PhD thesis at the University of Bath; and the style can at times be difficult for the general reader, particularly in the early chapters, which explain the sociological theories that inform the book. These theories include “power structure research”, which involves complicated diagrams full of interlocking arrows. However, to do Aked justice, there are only a few of such diagrams in the book and they are presented in simplified form. But the best parts of Friends of Israel are the later chapters, in which Aked gets away from abstract theories and down to the nitty-gritty of evidence.

A notable instance – and one that gives the book its title — is the clear and incontrovertible evidence Aked lays out (pp. 108-110) to show that the Israeli Embassy helped to set up the many “Friends of Israel” groups that in recent years have sprung up, like mushrooms, all over the UK.  These groups are dubbed “grassroots” by their supporters; but Aked calls them – using a brilliant new sociological jargon word – “astroturf” groups, after the term for artificial grass:

While often referred to as ‘grassroots’ bodies, having been co-created by the embassy, these groups are effectively ‘manufactured civil society’ and are therefore more appropriately termed ‘astroturf’ groups (p. 109).

At the same time, the author is very concerned to avoid antisemitic conspiracy theories that suggest that Israel, and a Jewish Lobby acting as agents of Israel, control British life. Aked points out the limitations of the Israel Lobby (p. 9); and also stresses that Jewish communal organizations such as the Board of Deputies are not acting as agents of Israel but are deeply embedded in the British Establishment, which itself has a vested interest in support for Israel (pp. 26-28).

Summing up the “key pro-Israel actors”, Aked writes (p. 205) that

most of the key pro-Israel actors in this book are not representative Jewish communal groups. Instead, they include politicians affiliated with Conservative Friends of Israel, Zionist lawfare groups like UK Lawyers for Israel, a small number of wealthy pro-Israel philanthropists (who don’t represent Jewish communities) and manufactured astroturf groups with a significant evangelical Christian base. (Italics in original.)

As well as the “Friends of Israel” groups (in which Christian Zionists play a significant part), the fanatically right-wing “manufactured astroturf groups” include the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). Aked points out that there is no evidence that the Israeli Embassy set up the CAA, but it “enjoyed remarkable levels of elite support as well as proximity and access to state power” (pp. 117-118; italics in original).  Much of the interest of the book is in Aked’s charting of these new right-wing groups that have arisen in recent years in the UK, as Israel, knowing it has lost the moral argument, desperately struggles to shore up support. This careful marshalling of evidence, plus the nuanced care to avoid conspiracy theories, constitute the main strength of the book.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that Aked’s very care to be “anti-racist” also leads to the book’s main weakness.  The author, who, in the Acknowledgements, identifies as “a trans non-binary person of colour”, seems to me to be over-influenced by the fashionable “wokeness” of “identity politics” and “anti-racism”.  This can lead Aked to let Israel off the hook; thus, despite all the evidence that the book lays out so meticulously, Aked argues against accusing Israel of “foreign interference”:

we should celebrate a world in which people’s attachments are multiple and cross borders, while questioning and challenging all allegiances to state power and nationalism…. Zionist activism in Britain should not be understood as ‘foreign interference’ (p. 27).

Yet, though the author’s arguments are convincing in relation to the older Establishment Jewish bodies and the CAA, surely the Israeli Embassy’s part in setting up over 40 “astroturf” “Friends of Israel” groups does constitute “foreign interference”?

Again, Aked’s “woke” obsession with “anti-racism” leads to denial that the charge of antisemitism against Corbyn’s Labour Party can be, in any sense, a “smear”.  Aked argues that it is true both that Corbyn’s opponents weaponized antisemitism against him and that there was then and is now a real problem of antisemitism within Labour: “to deny the very real presence of anti-Semitism within Labour would be deeply irresponsible” (p. 98). In this, Aked is following the “walking and chewing gum” approach of Barnaby Raine (whose views on racism Aked cites three pages later). Raine wrote in 2018 (without producing any evidence for his view):

Antisemitism is a conservative way of thinking, probably attractive to millions beyond the most open bigots. Labour is just as likely to be institutionally antisemitic, then, as institutionally misogynistic and homophobic; anti-capitalists should be the first to read these malaises as produced now and embedded in hierarchical societies rather than as marginal cases of a few bad apples whose presence is overstated by zealots.[1]

Aked’s only evidence for the claim of a “crisis” of antisemitism in Labour is to cite (p. 98) a 2017 JPR survey that found that “around 30 per cent of all adults in Britain are believed to hold at least one anti-Semitic attitude”. Yet, as Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, several of these so-called “anti-Semitic attitudes”, such as the statement that “Jews think they are better than other people” or “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes” are, at least in part, true. In what sense, then, can they be called antisemitic?[2]  And the survey did not conclude that Britain was riddled with antisemitism, arguing that attitudes were contradictory, and only if people were found to concur with five statements about antisemitism could they reasonably be called antisemites – about 2.5 per cent of the population.[3] Aked does not mention the actual statistics for antisemitism in the Labour Party in the Corbyn years, which are: 0.1 per cent accused of antisemitism and 0.01 per cent found guilty[4] – hardly a “crisis”.

Aked also insists that the issue of Labour’s adoption of the IHRA definition was not a matter of free speech but of racism: ”while certain sections of the white pro-Palestinian left reduced the IHRA issue to one of free speech, the debacle spoke to a wider – arguably, global – phenomenon in which, as scholar Liz Fekete observes, ‘the nature of anti-racism itself’ had ‘emerged as the key site of struggle’” (p. 101). It seems to me that Aked is the one who is reducing everything to a question of racism. Aked’s tortuous argument (pp. 99-102) is that a) one of the IHRA clauses – that it could be antisemitic to say that a State of Israel is a “racist endeavour” – implicitly denies the Nakba and so is racist against Palestinians; b) the IHRA definition is itself part of a “hierarchy of racism” (p. 101), in which antisemitism is seen as more important than Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc. But if Labour were to adopt definitions of all these other “phobias”, these definitions would also lead to issues of freedom of speech. To Aked, however, the IHRA definition is just one part of the “institutional racism” (p. 102) of the whole of Britain. It is ironic that Aked writes at the end of this passage: “the fight against all forms of racism must be indivisible” (p. 102); but it is Aked’s own argument that creates entirely gratuitous division between black and white pro-Palestinian activists by suggesting that it is only “certain sections of the white pro-Palestinian left” who see the issue as primarily one of free speech.

Another problem I have with the book is that it refers throughout to “BDS” as something monolithic.  Aked makes no mention, for instance, of the debates within the BDS movement about the academic and cultural boycotts that have targeted Israel within the ’67 borders versus the form of BDS that has targeted only the Occupation. The BDS victories that Aked records — Veolia (p. 131), G4S (p. 38), Leicester City Council, Swansea and Gwynedd local authorities in Wales (pp. 138-9) – were mostly against the Occupation. As Aked points out (p. 117) the Tricycle Theatre, which in 2014 asked the Jewish Film Festival to drop its Israeli Embassy funding, did so not because the Tricycle supported the BDS cultural boycott, but because Israel was bombing Gaza at the time. It is true that, as the author writes in the Preface, “between 2020 and 2022, Israeli human rights groups Yesh Din and B’Tselem, followed by leading international NGOs Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reached the … conclusion” that Israel is now an apartheid regime across the whole land; but, as Aked points out, the international consensus has only shifted in the last three years, as it became clear that Israel has de facto annexed the Palestinian Territories.

Aked writes (p. 29) that the development of the idea of Jewish statehood “in the late nineteenth century followed centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, and its immediate context was a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia”; and Aked also (p. 7) quotes Brian Klug: “with the rise of anti-Semitic parties … and the Nazi accession to power in Germany, it appeared to many Jews in Europe and elsewhere that there were only two solutions to this question: either Herzl’s or Hitler’s”.  Yet throughout the book, Israel is called a “settler-colonial project”, even though one might have thought the author would have qualified this stark term a little, in view of the historical background to which the book refers.

In the Introduction, the author asks: “Is it possible to write an anti-racist book about the pro-Israel lobby? I hope to show that it is”.  Aked succeeds in avoiding any possible trace of antisemitism; and I have found this book in many ways informative, illuminating, and meticulous. But the flip side of the “anti-racist” coin is that Aked’s extreme “wokeness” can at times lead the book into contortions, contradictions and confusions that to some extent undermine its conclusions.

Listen to a podcast of Hil discussing the book on Politics, Theory, Other

Notes

[1] How Labour’s Dreadful Antisemitism Debate Has to Change. For “walking and chewing gum” watch this interview with Barnaby Raine and Norman Finkelstein:

[2] The chimera of British anti-Semitism (and how not to fight it as if it were real)

[3] See Antisemitism in contemporary Great Britain: a new report

[4] See Barry Gardiner interviewed on Sky News’s programme Sophy Ridge on Sunday; about 6’ in for the detailed statistics: