Under cover of 'charity' status, the Israel lobby is subverting UK politics

Charity Commission gives its stamp of approval to groups hounding Jewish critics out of the Labour party and assisting Israel in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

It is now indisputable that the Charity Commission is abusing the label “charity” to confer legitimacy on lobby groups engaged in covert political activity subverting what is left of Britain's threadbare democracy.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which has been designated a charity since its creation a decade ago, was founded to smear critics of Israel as antisemites. Its biggest scalp was Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader.

Buoyed by that victory, the CAA went on to smear as antisemites Jews who oppose Israeli apartheid and war crimes. One of the groups of Jews it has targeted most aggressively is Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), which supported Corbyn.

In 2020, JVL challenged the CAA's status as a charity for just such blatantly political activities. Charity regulations state that “an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political”.

The head of the CAA is Gideon Falter, who was caught out last month misrepresenting an argument with a Met police officer to suggest the officer had made an antisemitic remark. During the row, Falter had claimed he was being prevented from crossing a road in London during a march against the genocide in Gaza because he is Jewish.

A video of the incident, however, shows the police had stopped Falter and other CAA activists on public order grounds, because they were trying to provoke a confrontation with the marchers.

After years of foot-dragging, the Charity Commission has now decided – preposterously – that the JVL is not “a person that is or may be affected" by the CAA's smear campaign against it. In other words, the commission has chosen to sidestep making a decision on whether the CAA is a political lobby group masquerading as a charity, when it all too clearly is.

The commission's pretext is patently a falsehood too. The CAA has been at the forefront of efforts to get Jewish members of JVL expelled from the Labour party, and under Sir Keir Starmer has enjoyed a great deal of success.

Starmer has been only too willing to expel Labour party members for being the "wrong sort of Jews" – that is, ones who make him look bad by opposing the current atrocities in Gaza when he has publicly backed the genocide there as Israel "defending itself".

Whatever the Charity Commission claims, the JVL is most certainly an "affected party". The CAA has been rooting out leftwing Jews from one of Britain's two main political parties. It has done so because those Jews make it implausible to claim that all British Jews support Israel's slaughter in Gaza and that, therefore, it is antisemitic for the rest of us to oppose it.

The CAA needs its charity status, if only to make it credible for the political and media class to cite it as some of sort of dispassionate arbiter of antisemitism rather than what it is: an Israel lobby group trying to covertly influence British foreign policy to a genocidal Israel's advantage and silence critics through smear and intimidation campaigns.

The CAA is not the only Israel lobby group being offered protection by the Charity Commission. The UK branch of the Jewish National Fund, which actively assists the Israeli state in promoting policies to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homes, also enjoys charity status in Britain. Campaigners have spent years futilely trying to get the commission to take action. If expelling Palestinians from their lands is considered charitable activity, then the word has lost all meaning.

Note too that the JNF – a critical partner in the Israeli state’s apartheid regime over Palestinians – is one of the main funders of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. Surprise, surprise: the Israel lobby is there to advance the interests of a foreign state.

The left has long argued that the British establishment – through the Conservative party, the now-dominant rightwing of the Labour party, and the state-corporate media – has been coopting willing Israel lobby groups like the CAA to do its dirty work of cleansing British politics of progressives.

Were the left not forced continually on to the defensive, it might be in a position to stress alternatives to permanent austerity at home and permanent war abroad, policies that just so happen to enrich British elites.

The Charity Commission, like other institutional structures of the British state, is very much part of that establishment. Which is why it made a doubly nonsense ruling this week in refusing to remove the CAA’s charitable status.

The British political system is rigged. This week the Charity Commission confirmed that it is committed to keeping it that way.

[Many thanks to Dr Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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