Israel: The Ally That Eats You From the Inside

Israel has conducted false flag bombings, attacked a US Navy vessel, stolen classified secrets from Washington, plotted the removal of British MPs, embedded intelligence agents in Silicon Valley, and used terrorism laws in allied countries to silence journalists. At some point, “special relationship” begins sounding like a hostage situation.

Cover: via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

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James McLeod || There’s a word for a country that bombs your civilian infrastructure, murders your sailors, steals your most classified intelligence, infiltrates your political parties, puts MPs on hit lists, embeds its former spies inside your biggest tech firms, and then arrests your journalists for covering it. That word, apparently, is ally.

Israel is routinely described in Western political discourse as America’s and Britain’s closest strategic partner: a beacon of democracy in a turbulent region, a plucky nation surrounded by enemies, deserving of unconditional financial, diplomatic, and military support. What is discussed rather less frequently — in mainstream coverage, at least — is what Israel has actually done to those allies when it thought no one was looking. Or, more precisely, what it’s done while being fairly confident that no one would dare say anything even if they were.

This is that story. Not a story about Hamas, or October 7, or Iran. A story about a country operating covertly against the very governments that arm, fund, and protect it. A story with a seventy-year paper trail. And, usefully, a story that Israel’s own press has often told — with a candour that puts Western media to shame.

The Beginning: When Israel Bombed Egypt and Blamed It on Everyone Else

It is 1954. Egypt’s new President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is negotiating with Britain over the Suez Canal zone. Israel, concerned that Britain might withdraw its military presence and thereby embolden Nasser, decides to do something about it. The method they choose is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary: a false flag bombing campaign inside a nominally friendly country.

Operation Susannah — which would later become known internationally as the Lavon Affair — was run by Israeli military intelligence. A sleeper cell of Egyptian Jews, trained in delayed-action explosive devices, was dispatched to bomb American- and British-owned civilian targets in Cairo and Alexandria. Post offices, cinemas, libraries, the American cultural centres. The bombings were timed to go off after closing time, to minimise casualties while maximising political damage. The goal was to make Egypt look ungovernable and dangerous, and thereby persuade the British to stay.

The operation failed catastrophically. One bomber was caught at an Alexandria cinema when his device ignited prematurely in his pocket. Under interrogation, the network unravelled. Eleven operatives were arrested. Two — Dr. Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar — were hanged in Cairo in January 1955. Others received life sentences. The Egyptian government announced the arrest of a “thirteen-man spy ring” in October 1954, but Israel denied any involvement whatsoever.

That denial held — officially — for over fifty years. In 2005, the surviving operatives were awarded certificates of appreciation by Israeli President Moshe Katsav. Israel finally, quietly, acknowledged what it had done. By then, most people had stopped paying attention.

The operation was codenamed Susannah. In Israel, it was referred to for years only as

HaEsek HaBish — “the Unfortunate Affair.” The name is instructive. Not a war crime. Not an act of terrorism against allied nations. An unfortunate affair. As if the bombing of American and British institutions in a foreign country was a slightly awkward dinner party incident rather than a state-sponsored false flag designed to manipulate two of Israel’s closest backers.

The Lavon Affair established a template. Israel would operate against the interests of allies when its own strategic interests demanded it. It would deny everything for as long as possible. And it would eventually, decades later, quietly acknowledge what had happened and award the perpetrators medals.

1967: The Ship That Wasn’t Supposed to Survive

Thirteen years after Operation Susannah, Israel did something considerably more brazen.

On June 8, 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats spent seventy-five minutes attacking the USS Liberty — an American naval intelligence vessel clearly operating in international waters, flying the American flag.

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Israel’s Six-Day War Started With a Lie

Thirty-four American sailors were killed. A further 174 were wounded. The ship, which was not a combat vessel and had no meaningful capacity to return fire, was nearly sunk.

Al Jazeera’s 2014 documentary The Day Israel Attacked America examined the incident in detail, using first-hand testimony from survivors alongside audio recordings obtained by the network — recorded in real time by the Israeli military during the assault. The documentary argues, on the basis of survivor testimony and the tactical coherence of the attack pattern, that Israel knew it was attacking an American vessel.

Survivors reported that Israeli reconnaissance aircraft made multiple passes over the ship for hours before the attack began. The USS Liberty was a large, distinctively configured intelligence ship, flying a five-by-eight-foot American flag in clear visibility conditions, remember that for the next paragraph. Crew members watched Israeli jets circle overhead. Then the jets came back, this time strafing the deck and firing rockets. Israeli torpedo boats followed. When the Liberty crew attempted to launch lifeboats to rescue survivors in the water, Israeli gunboats reportedly fired on those, too.

Israel has maintained, consistently and officially, that the attack was a case of mistaken identity — that pilots misidentified the Liberty as an Egyptian vessel. The United States government accepted this explanation with remarkable speed. An inquiry was convened and concluded within days. No Israeli personnel faced consequences.

What the United States government did not make public at the time — and has never fully addressed — is what the attack was potentially designed to achieve. One theory, supported by several senior former American officials, is that Israel intended to sink the ship and blame Egypt, thereby drawing the United States into the conflict on the Israeli side, potentially including direct strikes on Cairo. Then-Undersecretary of State George Ball later said the attack appeared intentional.

The USS Liberty Veterans Association has spent decades calling for a proper congressional investigation. None has ever been held. The last official inquiry lasted less than a week.

The Israeli government, for its part, has never rescinded its mistaken identity explanation, despite the implausibility that multiple pilots and torpedo boat commanders could all misidentify a clearly marked American ship in good visibility, at close range, for an extended period of time.

Jonathan Pollard: Stealing from the Hand That Feeds You

By the 1980s, American support for Israel had become structural. Military aid, diplomatic cover, a guaranteed UN Security Council veto on any resolution critical of Israeli conduct.

The relationship was — and remains — one of the most lopsided bilateral arrangements in modern diplomatic history, in which the larger and wealthier party provides essentially unconditional support to the smaller one, with remarkably little asked in return.

Given this context, what Israel did next requires a certain appreciation of nerve.

Jonathan Pollard was an American naval intelligence analyst. Between 1984 and 1985, he stole an estimated 800,000 classified pages of US intelligence and passed them to Israel.

The material included satellite imagery, signals intelligence on Arab military capabilities, and — critically — information about US intelligence-gathering methods worldwide. According to assessments made after his arrest, some of that material was subsequently shared by Israel with the Soviet Union, in exchange for allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. American intelligence officers and double agents operating in the Soviet Union died as a result.

Pollard was arrested in 1985, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. He served thirty years before being released on parole in 2015. In 2020, his parole restrictions ended, and he moved to Israel, where he was personally greeted at Ben Gurion Airport by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump subsequently issued a full pardon to Aviem Sella, the Israeli military officer who had served as Pollard’s handler and who had been under indictment in the United States.

The Times of Israel covered Netanyahu’s welcome of Pollard at the airport without any trace of apparent irony — a man who had caused the deaths of American intelligence officers, being received as a hero by the leader of America’s closest ally, while American politicians smiled and continued approving military aid packages.

Al Jazeera’s analysis of the affair noted that Israel had, at the time, approved the operation at the highest levels — “by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin,” making the decision all the more extraordinary given the depth of Israel’s financial and military dependence on Washington.

As the Al Jazeera editorial observed: the most devoted ally. The largest Jewish population outside Israel. The veto at the UN. The $38 billion in military aid packages. And Israel still ran a spy inside the most sensitive heart of American naval intelligence.

The Lobby: An Embassy With a Hit List

In January 2017, Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit broadcast the first episode of a brilliant four-part undercover investigation called The Lobby. An undercover reporter — referred to throughout as “Robin” — spent six months embedded in the network of pro-Israel organisations operating in Britain. What he recorded was not particularly subtle.

Shai Masot was a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy in London. His business card said “senior political officer.” His LinkedIn profile confirmed it. He described himself as a former major in the Israeli military, and his role at the embassy as being the chief point of contact between the Israeli government and British MPs. He was, by any reasonable definition, a diplomat — though the Israeli embassy would later insist he was a “junior employee” after the footage became public.

In footage recorded at a London restaurant in October 2016, Masot asked Maria Strizzolo — a British civil servant and former aide to Conservative minister Robert Halfon — for a favour.

He wanted to give her a list of MPs he would like her to help “take down.” The targets included Sir Alan Duncan, then Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and Crispin Blunt, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Both men had been critical of Israeli settlement expansion. Both had spoken in favour of Palestinian statehood.

Strizzolo’s response — captured on camera — was instructive. Rather than expressing alarm at being asked by a foreign government official to help destroy the careers of elected representatives, she said: “Well, if you look hard enough, I’m sure that there is something they’re trying to hide.” She then added: “A little scandal, maybe.”

This was not a rogue actor. In separate footage, Masot discussed how the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs had asked him to set up a front organisation in the UK, to be covertly operated by Israel’s government while appearing independent. He described the embassy’s existing relationships with Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel — and explained that the key principle was to keep the Israeli government’s fingerprints off the organisations publicly, while controlling them substantively. As he put it: “It’s good to leave those organisations independent. But we help them, actually.”

He had, by his own account, obtained a promise of more than one million pounds from the Israeli government to fund MP trips to Israel through Labour Friends of Israel alone.

The Haaretz analysis that followed the scandal noted that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had, months before the footage aired, circulated an internal cable warning that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ activities in London could put Israeli officials in violation of British law. That cable had been ignored.

Masot resigned. The Israeli ambassador apologised to Sir Alan Duncan. The Foreign Secretary — Boris Johnson, whom Masot had called an “idiot” in the same recording — declared the matter closed. No formal inquiry into Israeli interference in British democratic processes was held. The UK’s regulator for the communications services (Ofcom) launched an investigation into Al Jazeera’s documentary cleared the broadcaster on all four counts of alleged bias and anti-Semitism. The story, briefly scandalous, was quietly buried.

The Lobby USA: When Spycraft Meets Campus Politics

While Al Jazeera was running its British undercover operation, a second undercover reporter — operating under the name “Tony” — was spending five months embedded in the pro-Israel advocacy network in Washington DC, with access to some of the most influential organisations in American foreign policy lobbying.

The US documentary was completed in October 2017. It has never been officially broadcast by Al Jazeera. It was suppressed — a fact that the network’s own head of investigations, Clayton Swisher, publicly attributed to pressure on the Qatari government from pro-Israel lobby groups. The Zionist Organisation of America’s president Morton Klein subsequently claimed credit for lobbying Qatar not to screen the film. According to reporting by Haaretz, Qatari leaders had given private assurances to Jewish American organisations that the film would not air.

Leaked copies were eventually published by the Electronic Intifada in November 2018, simultaneously with French and Arabic outlets. What they showed was a picture of systematic, coordinated interference in American domestic politics by the Israeli government, operating through a network of ostensibly independent organisations.

Jacob Baime, head of the Israel on Campus Coalition, admitted in undercover footage that his organisation coordinated its activities with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. He described his approach to targeting pro-Palestinian student activists using the language of counterinsurgency. He characterised the strategy as being modelled on General Stanley McChrystal’s approach, and described it as working “really well.” The tactics included deploying anonymous smear websites targeting individual activists and academics.

The Israel on Campus Coalition, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and The Israel Project were all, according to the documentary, operating as de facto agents of the Israeli government without being registered as foreign agents under US law. Eric Gallagher, a senior figure at The Israel Project, described the extent of AIPAC’s influence in Congress directly: “Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them.” He added, approvingly, that AIPAC had just secured $38 billion in security aid to Israel.

Separately, the film documented an Israeli government-linked campaign against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in the United States, including the use of fabricated sexual harassment allegations posted anonymously against pro-Palestinian academics. One professor — Bill Mullen of Purdue University — described how his wife was sent links to a fake harassment claim, designed to destroy his marriage. His daughter’s name was also used. “These people will do anything,” he said in the documentary. “They’re capable of doing anything.”

The Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which oversaw much of this operation, was described by investigators as being “largely staffed by Israeli spies.” Its annual budget for influence operations was reported at $45 million.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers subsequently wrote to the Attorney General demanding that Al Jazeera be registered as a foreign agent and investigated for its undercover methods. The organisations engaging in covert foreign lobbying, needless to say, were not.

Unit 8200: The Intelligence Unit That Moved to Silicon Valley

Drop Site News — the independent investigative outlet founded in 2024 by journalists Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill — published a report in August 2025 that placed a new dimension on the question of Israeli penetration of allied institutions. The numbers were stark.

As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are employed in the US technology sector. Of those, 900 come from Unit 8200 — the Israeli Defence Forces’ elite signals intelligence division, roughly comparable to America’s NSA or Britain’s GCHQ — and they hold senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at firms including Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. I wrote about elements of this back in February, in my article: Apple, Israel, and the Quiet Arms Race Inside Your Head.

The data came from an independent researcher who compiled a database — dubbed the “Eagle Mission” influence network — of individuals who publicly identify themselves as Unit 8200 veterans on LinkedIn while also listing employment at major US tech companies. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records.

Unit 8200 is not a former employer like a bank or a law firm. It is Israel’s primary signals intelligence and cyber-warfare organisation. Its alumni, while in service, were responsible for surveillance of Palestinian civilians, development of AI-assisted targeting systems in Gaza, and the creation of AI language models trained on millions of intercepted Palestinian communications. During the current war crimes, Unit 8200 has been credited with — among other things — the intelligence infrastructure that allowed Israel to detonate pagers across Lebanon in September 2024.

The tech firms that have absorbed this talent pipeline include Palo Alto Networks, which handles cybersecurity infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies worldwide. In July 2025, Palo Alto paid $25 billion to acquire CyberArk — an Israeli identity management firm whose founder and executive chairman is a Unit 8200 alumnus. So are the four co-founders of Wiz, the Israeli cloud computing firm Google bought for $32 billion. So is Palo Alto’s own founder and Chief Technology Officer. Nearly half of Palo Alto’s major acquisitions over the past decade have involved companies founded by individuals with Israeli intelligence backgrounds.

Paul Biggar, the tech entrepreneur and activist, put it plainly to Drop Site: “These companies handle their customers’ customer data. If you are a bank, and you are using Palo Alto Networks, the data about all your customers, and their transactions, are passing through servers that are controlled by spies, or former spies.”

Both the CIA and FBI have ranked Israel among America’s top counterintelligence threats, alongside Russia, China, and Iran. The Wall Street Journal published a celebratory profile of Unit 8200’s Silicon Valley pipeline in August 2024, praising the veterans for their “high- pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking.” No concern was expressed. The connection, Drop Site noted, rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Chinese involvement in tech — which, by contrast, generates Senate hearings and executive orders.

Jeffrey Epstein: The Spy Who Came to Dinner

In late 2025, Drop Site News published a multi-part investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with Israeli intelligence, based on a cache of emails between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, leaked by the pro-Palestinian hacking group Handala and distributed through Distributed Denial of Secrets. Drop Site authenticated the material through forensic analysis and cross-referenced it with documents released by the US House Oversight Committee.

What the emails reveal is not the conspiracy theory version of Epstein — the lurid, simplistic narrative favoured by the far right. What they reveal is something altogether more specific and documented: Epstein functioning as a fixer and dealmaker for Israeli intelligence interests, using his network of financial and political elites to open doors that no formal diplomat could access.

Epstein helped broker a formal security agreement between Israel and Mongolia, facilitating the purchase of Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology by the Mongolian government. He recruited high-profile American figures — including former Obama administration economist Larry Summers — onto advisory boards that smoothed the path for Israeli defence industry penetration into Mongolian markets.

He helped establish a covert backchannel between Israel and the Russian government at the height of the Syrian civil war, with the goal of persuading Moscow to remove Bashar al-Assad and replace him with a leader acceptable to both Russia and Israel. That particular plan did not come to fruition, but the conversations — between Epstein, Barak, and figures connected to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — demonstrate the extraordinary access Epstein commanded across multiple intelligence communities simultaneously.

He also helped sell mass surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire: an Israeli-designed system for monitoring the phone and internet communications of an entire country’s population.

A Mossad-linked operative named Yoni Koren — who had made his intelligence career in covert operations alongside the Mossad — regularly stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment for extended periods.

In one email, Epstein cautioned Barak to “wait until they could speak privately” before Barak notified Israeli intelligence leaders of a deal — and to “not go to number 1 too quickly.”

Number 1, as Drop Site noted, is a longstanding informal reference to the head of the Mossad.

Drop Site’s Murtaza Hussain described Epstein as having “an extensive relationship with Israeli intelligence, US intelligence, and the intelligence agencies of other countries.” He characterised Epstein as “a dealmaker and a fixer at a very, very elite level.” The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal did not publish stories on the reporting. The documents, Hussain and Grim noted with visible exasperation, were sitting in publicly accessible archives.

Richard Medhurst and the Terrorism of Covering Israel

If the Shai Masot scandal showed Israel was willing to interfere in British politics, the case of Richard Medhurst suggests the interference has grown rather more sophisticated since 2017.

Medhurst is a phenomenal British journalist born in Damascus, the son of two UN Peacekeepers. He has reported extensively on Gaza, Lebanon, the Assange extradition, and Israeli military conduct. On August 15, 2024, counter-terrorism officers boarded his flight as it landed at Heathrow and arrested him under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 — a provision so broadly drafted that it criminalises expressing an opinion that could encourage support for a proscribed organisation, with a maximum sentence of fourteen years.

He was, by his own account and the confirmation of press freedom organisations, the first journalist in British history to be arrested under that particular provision.

The subsequent events took on a shape that would be hard to dismiss as coincidental.

Medhurst’s case file was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service by police in May 2025.

Shortly before that, it emerged that the Israeli Embassy in London — specifically Deputy Ambassador Daniella Grudsky — had been given the contact details of the CrownProsecution Service and counter-terrorism police, by the office of the UK Attorney General.

The Attorney General in question, Richard Hermer, had publicly acknowledged that he had “dear family members currently serving in” the Israeli Defence Forces.

Medhurst published a redacted email showing this exchange had taken place. He asked, reasonably enough, how an Attorney General with family in the IDF — who had the final say on potential terrorism charges against a journalist who reported on Israeli military conduct — sharing CPS contacts with the Israeli Embassy could be anything other than a conflict of interest.

In February 2025, Austrian security services raided Medhurst’s home and studio in Vienna, detained him for seven hours, took his DNA and fingerprints, and seized his electronic devices. The Vienna state prosecutor accused him — a Christian man — of membership of Hamas’s military wing. The raid followed a September 2024 Israeli government report titled “Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Europe since October 7, 2023,” which prominently identified Medhurst by name.

The National Union of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists condemned both arrests as attacks on press freedom. The World Socialist Web Site described it as “a confirmation” of Israeli influence over the Starmer government. Medhurst himself has said he believes his arrest was connected to Israeli pressure on the British government — noting the timeline between the Israeli government report naming him and his subsequent arrest and the embassy’s access to the CPS.

The British government has not commented on the conflict of interest. The Attorney General has not recused himself. Medhurst remains under investigation.

The Weapon That Never Runs Out of Ammunition

Threaded through all of these operations — from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs covert lobbying to the smear campaigns against US academics to the targeting of British MPs — is a consistent secondary weapon: the accusation of antisemitism.

In The Lobby, Al Jazeera’s undercover footage captured a training session at the 2016 Labour Party conference, convened by pro-Israel activists with links to the Israeli embassy, where participants were told to be careful what language they used when criticising Israel.

Questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state was described as antisemitic. Using the word “Zionism” was presented as a potential trigger for complaint. Joan Ryan MP was filmed filing a formal antisemitism complaint against a Labour Party member who had done nothing more than debate a two-state solution with her.

The complaint was later dismissed. But the effect was documented in the film: the accusation itself, regardless of its merit, was the point. As The Israel Project’s Jonathan Schanzer admitted — on hidden camera — “antisemitism as a smear is not what it used to be.” He said it without apparent regret.

Jacob Baime of the Israel on Campus Coalition described, in the same footage, running anonymous websites to smear pro-Palestinian student activists, deploying what he called counterinsurgency tactics against American college students exercising constitutionally protected speech.

Haaretz itself — Israel’s own liberal newspaper of record — has documented the Israeli government’s strategic deployment of antisemitism allegations as a political tool, both domestically and internationally. In 2017, a leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry cable warned that Ministry of Strategic Affairs activities in London risked violating British law. The very same ministry was, simultaneously, running a $45-million-a-year influence operation that included falsely accusing its critics of antisemitism.

This is not incidental. It’s structural. The accusation functions as a pre-emptive defence against accountability, raising the cost of investigation to a point where most politicians, journalists, and institutions find it cheaper to simply look away.

What Israeli Media Actually Tells Us

There is a peculiar self-censorship that afflicts Western coverage of Israel — a reluctance to say plainly what Israeli journalists sometimes say with considerable frankness. This is worth examining not as a curiosity but as evidence.

Haaretz has reported on the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ foreign lobbying operations with a level of specificity that would be unusual in British or American outlets. It covered the Masot scandal immediately, reporting that the embassy’s activities “might have put them in violation of British law” months before Al Jazeera’s footage aired — meaning Israeli officials knew the legal risk and proceeded regardless.

The Times of Israel covered Jonathan Pollard’s arrival in Israel and his greeting by Netanyahu with apparent warmth, largely devoid of the reflection that might be expected from a US outlet covering the return of a man who had caused American intelligence officers’ deaths. When Pollard received a heroes’ welcome, the Times of Israel reported it as news. Not as an outrage.

When the Shai Masot scandal broke, the Times of Israel published factual accounts of the “take down” conversation and Masot’s subsequent resignation, without the protective framing that characterised some British coverage. The facts were presented plainly: an Israeli official had been caught on film planning to destroy the careers of elected British politicians. He resigned. The ambassador apologised.

Israeli military intelligence specialist Miri Eisin, speaking to the British Observer about Mossad operations, offered perhaps the most telling contribution:

“I don’t think people realise how much audacity we have.”

She said this as a statement of professional pride. Not as a confession. Not as an admission requiring qualification or context. Audacity, in this framing, is not something to be ashamed of. It is the point.

The Conclusion That Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

The pattern documented here — across seventy years, across multiple continents, across Democratic and Republican, Labour and Conservative governments — is not disputed by the evidence. It is the evidence.

Israel has conducted false flag bombings designed to manipulate its closest allies. It attacked a US Navy vessel and killed American sailors. It ran a spy inside the classified heart of American naval intelligence. It plotted the political destruction of British MPs through an embassy official. It ran a $45-million covert operation to infiltrate and manipulate political life in both the UK and the United States. It has embedded over a thousand former intelligence operatives in the companies that control the data infrastructure of the Western world. It has used a convicted sex offender as an intelligence fixer to broker weapons deals and geopolitical backchannels. And it has deployed — as a systematic tool — false accusations of antisemitism against anyone who tried to document any of the above.

None of this has resulted in sanctions. No diplomatic expulsions, beyond the immediate and brief embarrassment of Shai Masot. No congressional hearings on Israeli counterintelligence threats — despite the CIA and FBI listing Israel alongside Russia, China, and Iran. No suspension of military aid. No conditions attached to the $38 billion. No British government inquiry into Israeli interference in its democratic processes, despite Al Jazeera’s documentary being cleared by Ofcom on every count.

What has happened, instead, is that a journalist reporting on Gaza was arrested at Heathrow under terrorism legislation, while the country’s Attorney General passed the prosecution service’s contact details to the Israeli embassy.

When the history of this period is written — if it is written honestly — it will have to grapple with something uncomfortable: that Western governments have not merely permitted Israeli interference in their political institutions. They have, in many cases, actively assisted it. And done so while insisting, with insane conviction, that the relationship is one of equals, built on shared values. The shared value, it turns out, is impunity. And Israel has had rather more practice with it than most.

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