Patel caused a British media scandal in November 2017 when she used the cover of a “holiday” in Israel to attend a series of secret meetings with Israeli ministers organized by the Conservative Friends of Israel’s most influential lobbyist, Stuart Polak.
In defiance of ministerial rules, Patel had not declared the meetings in advance, so that they could be recorded by ostensibly non-partisan civil servants. This left her open to accusations of being open to Zionist lobbyist influence. Patel also lied about informing her peers of the content of the clandestine meetings. She later resigned.
Even Zionist-partisan BBC’ ‘reported at the time of the scandal that by going on a trip to Israel arranged by Polak, Patel was trying to win favor with rich pro-Israel Conservative donors in order to help finance a future run for leader of the party.’
Patel eventually was forced to admit that she had met with senior Israeli political and business leaders to commission “humanitarian and development partnership between Israel and the UK” but several of the so-called humanitarian projects were intended to hand over British aid money to the Israeli Occupation Forces.
As one astute reader commented on the EI article:
Israel today possesses so many agents of influence in Parliament and the cabinet that singling out Patel for attention can seem rather arbitrary. From Johnson, Starmer and their close associates, through teams of advisers, on into the donor class, the scope of corruption is simply nauseating. Nevertheless, Patel exhibits a degree of unflinching and really heartless opportunism which will in times to come be seen as something of a standard for the era.
In her service to Israel as well as her willingness to lend her name to every initiative aimed at circumscribing the rights of immigrants, the poor and voices of political dissent, Patel stands out as one of the most aggressive practitioners of smash and grab politics. She’s also a harbinger of things to come (think Kamala Harris in the U.S.) in which ethnic, racial and gender diversity demands are being co-opted, producing corporate-friendly leaders immunised against criticism by virtue of their colour and sex.
The Tories are proving just how easy it is to promote punitive figures and policies under the guise of reform and openness. Not long ago, Patel, Sunak, Kwarteng and their like would have seen their prospects in the Tory Party as being virtually nil due to the ingrained racism of the membership. The racism remains, but a value has been found in presenting minority and female champions of greed and reaction as the new face of conservatism. We have entered the stage of identity politics, and there’s no shortage of people willing to perform to such a script.
It appears as if Sunak’s Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, is following in the footsteps of the Patel opportunism and allegiance to Israel over her responsibilities and service to her own country and the interests of the people.
Suella Braverman – the ‘face of cruel Britannia’
“That Braverman takes pride in saying things that a more temperate or empathetic politician would never think to express is beyond denial. But it would be wrong to assume that it’s a cynical career manoeuvre, or that she has adopted racist rhetoric so as to make her own racial identity acceptable to the Tory right.” Andrew Anthony
Braverman has a history littered with cruel and downright racist or denigrating policies for the vulnerable in British society. Braverman has described sleeping rough on Britain’s streets as a “lifestyle choice”. She has claimed that streets are being “taken over” by the homeless and destitute which would inevitably, according to Braverman, lead to “an explosion of crime, drug taking and squalor”
Braverman informs us that many of those living in tents provided by charities who provide for the homeless -are “from abroad” and as such they do not deserve any kind of shelter from the elements. Braverman wants to fine those charities for supplying tents to the vulnerable because they are literally ‘untermensch’ or subhuman in her opinion.
No mention of the wars waged by the UK Globalist alliance against the refugee countries of origin that have resulted in a mass exodus from the terrorist forces in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan etc funded, supported, promoted and weaponised by the UK and US against the target nations – targeted for regime change, destabilisation, resource and land-grab projects and reduction to failed statehood.
Braverman associates dispossessed and vulnerable refugees with criminalism, drugs and describes them as possessing values “at odds with our country”.
The home secretary refused to criticise claims by the immigration minister Robert Jenrick that people who cross the Channel to seek asylum in the UK threatened to “cannibalise” the UK’s compassion.
The UK’ “humanitarian” “democratic” bombing and proxy wars drove these people from their land and their homes in the first place. It displaced entire communities and it dispossessed them of their land and their dignity, now Braverman wants to compound their dehumanisation with polices that strip them of their most basic human rights.
Braverman declares UK anti-genocide marches as ‘hate marches’
Braverman is singularly hardline about the recent public explosion of protest against the Zionist genocidal policy determined to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. An estimated 4,500 children have perished under Zionist bombs, thousands more are still under tons of rubble in Gaza, dying slowly from lack of oxygen or with crushed bodies unable to survive.
These children are not even referred to by Braverman in her bias towards Israeli deaths, many of which are now attributed to their own IOF forces shelling the buildings where they were sheltering with their Palestinian captors two days after the initial Al Aqsa Flood operation on 7th October.
Many ravers at a party held under the shadow of the Zionist controlled concentration camp, Gaza, were caught in the crossfire between IOF and Palestinian Resistance factions – also resulting in their deaths. Hostages released by their Palestinian captors spoke of humane treatment and kindness from their Palestinian guards while accusing Israeli military and government officials of not ensuring their safety and abandoning them to their fate.
In this video, the Palestinian guards release two hostages including 85 year old Yosheved Lifshitz who during her interview said – “They were very friendly toward us. They took care of us. We were given medicine and were treated. One of the men with us was badly injured in a motorbike accident. Their (Hamas) paramedics looked after his wounds, he was given medicine and antibiotics. The people were friendly. They kept the place very clean. They were very concerned about us.”
In a complete inversion of reality Braverman claims:
“We’ve seen now tens of thousands of people take to the streets following the massacre of Jewish people, the single largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map,”
So we should only have sympathy for the Israelis? None for the carpet bombing of Gaza, the massacre of children, women, young and old men who are not “Hamas”? We should have sympathy for the brutal occupiers, not for the Palestinians, persecuted for more than a century by a British incubated terrorist, racist settler construct that was enabled to steal the land of Palestinians, to massacre them, to poison their water sources, to starve them, to detain thousands of them in sordid jails where they are submitted to all kinds of abuse, torture and inhumane treatement at the hands of their captors?
As Netherlands politician Sylvana Simons put it so succinctly recently in the Dutch Parliament:
“Omitting the context of 75 years of dehumanization, displacement, house theft, destruction, robbery, ethnic cleansing and murder at the hands of Israel, makes the Netherlands not only complicit in the dehumanization of the Palestinians, but also in the legitimization of illegal colonial settlements. And by allowing this for decades, the Netherlands – in collaboration with European and American allies – has single-handedly placed Israel above the law. With dire consequences. Every person that falls victim, is a victim of colonialism. And once more, the Netherlands is also to blame.”
Braverman is driven to erase the dark history of more than a century of Zionist genocidal policies towards the Palestinian people and when the people of the UK rise up to prevent the continuation of the Nakba that began in 1948, Braverman comes to the aid of the Zionist project and all that it entails.
Recently two documents have been released, the second from the Israeli Intelligence Agencies, detailing the strategy of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Forced evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai and the creation of the 7km “sterile zone” to prevent their return. It is entirely justified, in my opinion, to compare this project to what the Nazis did to Jews, Communists and undesirable ethnic minorities during their savage pogroms.
This Zionist genocide is normalised by the likes of Braverman both in their upholding of already debunked Israeli narratives that maintain the myth of “Hamas” acts of terror to justify the mass extermination of Palestinians in Gaza and in their description of public horror at such a policy as “hate marches”. It is a depraved Israeli policy, seeped in cruelty, sadism, religious zealotry that has no relation to Judaism and involves the rampant dehumanisation of the Palestinians, but this is ok for Braverman.
Braverman and Israel – a conflict of interest?
In 2015 while Conservative MP for Fareham, Braverman or then Suella Fernandes visited Israel on a trip sponsored by the Conservative Friends of Israel. In 2018 she married Rael Braverman, a manager at Mercedes-Benz and a Zionist.
Braverman features regularly in the Jewish Chronicle. In one report she describes the couple’s close affiliation to Israel and to Zionism:
Part of the reason for her anger is that her husband, Rael, is Jewish. “The Jewish community is our community,” she said. “My husband is a proud Jew and Zionist.
“He’s lived in Israel. We have close family members who serve in the IDF. My children will be raised with a strong sense of Jewish values and their Jewish heritage. We enjoy Friday night dinners at our mother-in-law’s.
Braverman is a regular visitor and supporter of the Zionist-aligned Community Security Trust (CST). Self-described as a representative of Britain’s Jewish community, CST has been exposed as a Zionist front group awarded protection from public scrutiny by the Charities Commission while mired in unhealthy connections to industry, corruption and British military and political classes.
Another [CST] director is David Menton, who is a director of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), a pro-Israeli advocacy group. BICOM established the We Believe in Israel advocacy organisation in the UK to counter opposition to Israel following its brutal repression of the second Palestinian intifada. WSWS
Under Priti Patel as Home Secretary, the CST was awarded GBP 14 million to ‘help keep members of the Jewish community safe’. According to EI CST is ‘a pro-Israel lobby group with close ties to the British government that habitually makes false accusations of anti-Semitism against Palestinians and their supporters’. CST were pivotal to the Israel lobby witch hunt against academic Prof. David Miller who won his case against his detractors and was cleared of the ubiquitous “anti-semitism” claims by a lawyer hired by Bristol Universtity to investigate the claims against him.
A lawyer hired by the UK’s University of Bristol to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism against Professor David Miller concluded that the academic had “no case to answer,” a leaked document shows.
From the ‘Support David Miller’ website:
We can reveal that a substantial number of the parliamentarians hounding Professor Miller have a vested interest in shielding Israel and the Zionist movement from scrutiny. Many have: accepted thousands of pounds in donations from Israel lobby groups; associated with pro-Israel campaigns; and forged connections with Zionist groups.
The following video ‘Israel Gravy Train’ (from the website) gives a horrifying glimpse into the influence brought to bear upon both Labour and Conservative MPs:
Despite his exoneration, Bristol University caved into pressure presumably from the Zionist lobby and fired Miller on the 1st October 2021 citing unspecified ‘standards of behaviour’. From EI:
The lawyer concluded that “his conduct cannot reasonably be categorized as misconduct.”
The document also shows that the complaint which resulted in Miller’s firing was instigated by two pro-Israel lobby groups and only later adopted by two pro-Israel students on campus.
The two students acted in collusion with the Community Security Trust – which has links to Israel’s deadly spy agency Mossad – and the Union of Jewish Students – which is funded by and acts as a front for the Israeli embassy in London.
Further reading on CST’s role in expanding Israeli/Zionist influence within the UK and protecting Israel from scrutiny for war crimes committed against the Palestinian people can be found here.
On October 12th Braverman told JC at the CST offices that “Police must show ‘zero tolerance’ towards antisemitism on the streets of Britain in the wake of the horrific terrorist atrocities in Israel”. ‘Atrocities’ that have been walked back even by the White House! No mention of the ongoing Zionist atrocities being committed hourly against the Palestinians in all occupied territories including the walled, caged Gazans who have no underground shelters to protect them and where all escape routes are blockaded or bombed by the Israeli warplanes.
Braverman further defended Israel by making clear that ‘Hamas killers were terrorists not militants” and spoke of security benefits that would come from blacklisting the IRGC – Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps which has assisted Syria in its 12 year battle against the proxy terrorist groups that have decimated Syrian infrastructure and are to this day stealing and occupying resources and depriving the Syrian population of essential services including electricity, gas, water and medical care. Terrorist groups including ISIS and Al Qaeda that have been assets of the UK and US regime change Globalist cartel.
Is Braverman defending the UK from Iran? Does her narrative protect UK national security or Israel’s?
Braverman is keen to push through legislation that will undermine the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a non violent protest against Israeli violations of Human Rights law.
Ben Jamal, the director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK said:
“With support growing around the world for the call issued by Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the British government seems determined to shield Israel, and companies involved in its occupation, from accountability for its violations of human rights and international law.”
Braverman goes on:
“Israel is a beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” she said. “Defending Israel is not part of the culture wars. It is symbolic of defending humanity.”
She clearly does not see Palestinians as part of the Humanity worthy of defending.
Speaking to the JC wearing a lapel pin showing the Israeli flag intertwined with the Union Jack, she recalled that she had visited Sderot in 2015 with Conservative Friends of Israel.
“The enormity of the barbarity that we’re seeing by Hamas terrorists towards Israel is unforgivable and sickening – the UK government is proud to stand as a friend of Israel through this horrific attack. This is terrorism, it’s brutality, it’s pure evil. That’s why I uphold Israel’s right to defend its borders and its security.”
What borders are those Braverman? The borders expanded at the expense of Palestinian and Syrian territory? Why no mention of defending the Palestinian right to self-defence or armed resistance against an apartheid, brutal, illegally occupying settler entity?
The omission of any compassion for the thousands of Palestinians being wiped from the face of the earth in a perpetual ethnic cleansing pogrom that is reaching a bloody climax under Israeli bombardment and forced evacuation since October 7th is abhorrently inhumane.
Braverman continues:
“Hate chants like ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, which to my mind mean only one thing — ethnic cleansing of Jews — went totally unpoliced. There were convoys of vehicles with people urging the rape of Jewish girls and murder of Jewish women, and again a blind eye was turned.”
Palestine being free from Apartheid oppression and Zionist inhumanity is a “hate chant”. Palestinians desirous of living as equal citizens in their own land is “hate”. Palestinians seeking justice for more than 75 years of crimes committed against them by the British-incubated Zionist land-grab settler entity is “hate”. Palestinians seeking the right to return to the land that was violently stolen from them is “hate”. Palestinians wishing to live in peace with Jews and Christians in a Palestinian state is “hate”. In the late 19th Century Jews considered Zionism to be another anti-semitic cult but Palestinians calling for an end to a usurper state which employs terrorism in every aspect of its management of the segregated and marginalised Palestinian population is “hate”.
A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. Nelson Mandela
As historian Louis Allday has pointed out in his essay ‘The Palestinian’s inalienable right to resist’:
Furthermore, regardless of what is mandated by international law, the Palestinians possess a fundamental moral right to resist their ongoing colonisation and oppression through armed resistance, and that right must be recognised and supported. The multi-generational suffering of the Palestinians, perhaps none more so than those who live in the besieged and bombarded Gaza strip, is unremittingly cruel and has one central cause: Israel and the perpetual belligerence, expansionism and racism that is inherent to its state ideology, Zionism.
Moreover, contrary to the Western media’s narrative that, without fail, portrays Israel as acting in ‘retaliation’, it is the actions of the Palestinians which are fundamentally reactive in nature, because the violence that Israel inflicts upon them is both perpetual and structural, and therefore automatically precedes any resistance to it. ‘With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun’, said Paolo Freire; ‘[n]ever in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed’. In Palestine, as Ali Abunimah recently wrote, ‘the root cause of all political violence is Zionist colonisation’.
Allday continues:
Those who are not under brutal military occupation or refugees from ethnic cleansing have no right to judge the manner in which those who are choose to confront their colonisers. Indeed, expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause is ultimately meaningless if that support dissipates the moment that the Palestinians resist their oppression with anything more than rocks and can no longer be portrayed as courageous, photogenic, but ultimately powerless, victims.
A friend that I met in Gaza in 2012 and 2013, Yousef M. AlJamal recently wrote an article entitled ‘Gaza won’t accept any more ethnic cleansing’. In the article AlJamal details the Zionist intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza from 1967 onwards:
Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank began in June 1967. Soon after the occupation started, Yigal Allon, then Israel’s labor minister, recommended “transferring” – a euphemism for expulsion – the people of Gaza to the Sinai en masse.
At the time the population of Gaza was approximately 400,000. Israel saw this population as a threat, whereas its “transfer” would ensure that no Palestinian state would be established based on boundary lines preceding the 1967 occupation.
In 1969, the Israeli government approved a secret plan from the spy agency Mossad to send large numbers of people living in Gaza (especially young men) on a one-way trip destined for Latin America.
AlJamal explains why Gaza is such a threat to the survival of the Zionist project. In 1948 Gaza fiercely resisted attempts by the Hagana forces to secure Zionist occupation of their land.
Israel has cut off water this month in an attempt to push Palestinians out of northern Gaza, including Gaza City. By doing so, Israel reminds us of what Zionist militias did in 1948.
Then, they destroyed and in some cases poisoned water wells in the district surrounding Gaza – a district comprised of 34 villages – pushing Palestinians to leave their homes.
AlJamal finishes by affirming that ‘Palestinians in Gaza are very clear. They will not relive the Nakba. Israel might use its lethal force to destroy Gaza. It might kill a lot of Palestinians. It might make a lot of Palestinians homeless. But the majority of Palestinians have made their minds up. As people in Gaza put it, heaven is closer than the Sinai.’
None of this invaluable context is ever examined by team Braverman. Someone wearing a T-shirt with a Palestinian flag on it is, by association, a terrorist.
“That is standing with the murderers. That is glorifying terrorism. That is on the wrong side of history. It’s not just idiotic, it’s heartless and it’s inhumane.”
She emphasised that British ‘Jews were safe on her watch’ but ignores the fact that there are British Jews marching in solidarity with Palestinians, and American Jews and European Jews.
Braverman has increased British funding for CST – a Zionist outreach agency embedded in the UK establishment and responsible for the harassment of leading political, academic or media figures pushing back against the capture of UK economic and foreign policy by the Zionist lobby.
As former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney told us in a recent interview with myself, Mike Robinson of UK Column and journalist Eva K Bartlett – she suffered 12 years of obstructive behaviour in Congress simply because she refused to sign a pledge of allegiance to Israel. She pointed out that her allegiance is to the US not to another country.
Israel’s Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, has just recommended nuking Palestinians in Gaza but for Braverman this is acceptable in “self-defence”?
If Israel is to deploy any part of its nuclear arsenal in Palestine or Lebanon or Syria or even Iran – how does this ensure Britain’s national security?
If Braverman’s allegiance is to the UK and takes into account the public push back against support for Israel and the bi-partisan refusal to call for a ceasefire while Palestinians are dying in droves trapped in an ever decreasing land mass – then she must take history into account and justice for Palestinians must be included in any UK foreign policy.
If the US or UK had any interest in de-escalation, the first step must be a cease fire. The second to stop arming and funding Israel. The third to boycott and sanction Israel – a policy that is wheeled out liberally against any other nation state that does not comply with US/UK global hegemony.
However we know this will not happen because in my opinion – the protection of the US/UK military outpost in West Asia, the associated resource-grab opportunities, the obstruction of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is their priority. Therefore at this stage of hurtling towards the unspeakable possibility of nuclear war – Israel is the priority, not UK national security and THIS is what every UK national should be fighting against tooth and nail – before it is too late.
Palestine, the Middle East countries that have been battling US/UK-led neocolonialist military projects are at the frontlines of fighting for our survival as human beings. Therefore, surely it is an obligation to stand in solidarity with them to prevent a terrifying future for mankind.
