In our work over the years, we have seen a very different British pattern of Middle Eastern involvement in politics to that of the US. There is no AIPAC as such. Alleged Saudi influence has only recently become nationally controversial. Both main political parties have been split between pro-Israeli and pro-Arab elements and the balance between sympathies has changed over time.

There is also no immediate assumption in British political life that Israel is always right (as was demonstrated by widespread public horror at the 2006 invasion of Lebanon). Quite frankly, peace process issues are of no great interest to most of the political class, let alone the general public, and, while evangelicals tend to be pro-Zionist as they are in the US, the religious role in politics is sharply reduced compared to the United States.

A Little Bit of History (Simplified)

Labour’s Left was traditionally pro-Israel for reasons not dissimilar to the instinctive cultural support for the country in the US. Israel was founded by pioneers with socialist or liberal principles, the Arabs were conservative and right-wing. Israel's leaders were tough, fought their way to settlement and 'made the desert bloom'.

But the generation of the 1940s and 1950s was a generation of working-class activists who loved cowboy movies and considered civilising 'savages' to be part of the process of social progress. The Palestinians were as disregarded as the Amerindians. The horrendous treatment of the Jews by the national socialists trumped every other consideration. Jews had also played a major role in the construction of the socialist critique of capitalism.

The Atlanticist Right within the Labour Party quite separately adopted a pro-Israel position against the Soviets. It developed attitudes similar to those of the US in the Cold War where any WASP anti-semitic sentiment soon got displaced by fear of Bolshevism.

Israel, originally a moderately socialist state vaguely in the Soviet camp, switched sides to the point that it was trading technologies within thirty years with the last remaining racist state, South Africa. Odd world!

A pivotal figure in the Labour commitment to Israel was the highly pro-Israeli figure Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It is now known that his administration played a material part in the provision of technology that enabled Israel to become a nuclear power - an error in British politics that may be second only to signing off on the Balfour Declaration without proper consideration of the effects.

In the 1970s, the Socialist Left adopted a strong pro-Palestinian position, partly as a reflection of a renewed commitment to 'national liberation' in the wake of the evenements in France, partly as a revolt against the concept of the anti-communist West central to establishment thinking and partly as a genuine discovery of the Palestinian narrative of dispossession.

What Happened Next

Given the undermining by the European Left of the cruise missile programme against the Soviet Union and of Libyan engagement in support of the miners' strike, 'Zionist' interests (represented in part by the US and Israeli Embassies in London) took an undoubtedly close interest in recovering ground for the Right of the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s – some say (if you believe the conspiracy theorists) that this led directly to the otherwise inexplicable ‘poodle’ policies of arch-Atlanticist Tony Blair.

But the New Labour programme has always had a very strong Zionist element in its own right. Often internally factionalised by North London and Leeds Jewish competition for status, it nevertheless was coherently Atlanticist and it had been loyal to the Party when other business interests had departed for the Social Democrat Party in the early 1980s. 

To be fair, British-Jewish support for New Labour was never a matter of command-and-control from Tel Aviv Central. It was natural for many British Jews of ashkenazi descent to support a Party that represented Enlightenment principles against a strain of Toryism that could be partly, if privately, anti-semitic up until the early 1980s. Those who wished to appease Hitler did not suddenly disappear in 1940.

These Jewish business groups were intimately engaged in raising funds both for the ‘Project’ (the recapture of the Labour Party by its internal right wing) and its subsequent maintenance of power within the Party.

Meanwhile, the Left crumbled under pressure largely because of its own remarkably inept organisation. It has even lost its strong anti-Islamist, neo-communist, minority to the Atlanticist project in protest at the threat to Enlightenment values that it perceives from the likes of Al-Qaradawi and Al-Qaeda. The war between left-wing Mayor Ken Livingstone and the London Jewish community is, in itself, a paradigm for a fundamental split over values within the metropolitan Left.

Pro-Arab sentiment in the centre-left is still there, but it is divided and increasingly lodged in the Liberal Democrats where it has exceedingly shallow roots and is tempered by an aggressive distaste for conservative dynasts and failures in human rights policy. 

The most active element in the pro-Arab Left, which peaked in the anti-war movement, is now lodged on the fringes of politics within a divided RESPECT movement. It has far more interest in getting out the Bangla Deshi vote in the East End of London than in Palestinian liberation. 

New Labour as State has now developed a fairly cynical and pragmatic commitment to the pro-Western dynasties which is deeply upsetting to its liberal base. This pragmatism now includes support for Israel's right to exist but not its right to behave with impunity. Its position on the Middle East requires alliance with regimes that constantly embarrass it on liberal grounds (as we have seen with the current controversy over the Saudi rape case).

Tory Responses to the Middle East

Americans must understand that the British make a clear distinction between anti-semitism (which has no place in public discourse) and criticism of Israel (which is regarded as legitimate so long as it is not hysterical).  There is none of that automatic conflation of the two attitudes that allows AIPAC to silence any American political criticism of actions taken by the Government in Tel Aviv.

The Tory Party was primarily imperialist and sometimes secretly anti-semitic in the first half of the last century. This anti-semitic element, never dominant or perhaps significant, was steadily reduced to a racist rump between the 1940s and the 1980s. It certainly has no purchase on the modern party. Those few who are minded to dislike Jews just because they are Jews have long since migrated towards the BNP. 

A far greater number of Tories remain Churchillian. Anti-semitism's association with national socialism and Israel's association with Atlanticism have come to make Churchillians fairly stalwart in defending Israel's right to exist. 

Otherwise Israel is largely an irrelevance to Tory thinking. As was the case with many on the postr-war Right in Europe, any anti-semitic aristocratic distaste for Jews as mere traders or as migrants was fully replaced, over time, by an admiration for Israel's democratic nationalism, its participation in the ‘West’ and its crusade against communism.

Jewish-British business figures and intellectuals also played a prominent role around Thatcher, in Government and as senior advisers. Out of that era, a strong right-wing Atlanticist wing has emerged even if it is not now quite so dominant within the Party now as then.  

Such 'Thatcherite' figures represented themselves within a code of British national-interest thinking in which being Jewish was merely a fact to be proud of. It was not necessarily a reason to try and impose Zionist thinking on a Government that was unlikely to be opposed Israel's core security interests. However, sympathy for Israel could and would be mobilised 'in extremis' to place pressure on government and often across party lines.

The more liberal, aristocratic and vaguely European wings of the Tory Party [‘High Tory’], on the other hand, have tended to admire Arabs, especially dynastic Arabs, because of the experience of empire (Nasser notwithstanding). This is the romanticism of the Travellers' Club.

There is something of a revival of ‘High Tory’ sympathy for the Arab interest, especially the interest of the Palestinians and of the conservative Sunni Arabs. The irony of high bourgeois Tories and low life Leftists converging on an analysis of American incompetence and perfidy is one of the delicious ironies of our time - as delicious as mainstream New Labour converging with neo-conservative hawkishness.

The tide began to flow the Arabist way in the wake of the Iraq War, more so after the Lebanon War. 'Arabism in the national interest' was also a convenient stick with which to beat New Labour, without diminishing a natural commitment to the 'idea of the West' or directly attacking Israel in anti-semitic terms.

The High Tories retain a strong commitment to the Atlantic Alliance but they want it to include more traditional ‘spheres of influence'. In this, they are thinking well within the mainstream of the new realist security thinking in Washington by which the West becomes a global 'values concept' rather than just a mere geographical expression surrounding just one ocean.

These Tories have also resisted the implicit republicanism of the wilder shores of the post-Thatcherite Liberal Right. They see the preservation of an ‘empire of conservative values’, rather than the actual extension of liberal values, as the appropriate concern for contemporary policy-makers.

Shifting Sands

The pro-Israeli element in Government has had a near-monopoly on political influence until recently, although conservative Arabs retained the ability to influence matters diplomatically and through the imperfect mechanism of bilateral dynastic links to the House of Windsor.

The Iraq War and the War on Terror changed the game by introducing the need to win 'hearts and minds' but it was the Lebanon invasion of 2006 and the subsequent departure of Blair that most changed the terms of political trade between the factions.

Israel overplayed its hand in Lebanon, which followed the US invasion of Iraq in testing the allies’ patience beyond its natural limits. 'Arabism’ (much disliked by Thatcher and ignored by Blair except as a means to the end of dialogue over ending terrorism) was also well embedded in the FCO and in sections of the security services. The ultimate Arabist triumph had been the Al-Yamammah project which brought much needed jobs in high-value engineering. 

So, there has always been an alternative advisory focus to the 'plucky little Israel' view of the New Labour establishment, while shifts in Saudi policy, including attempts at internal reform in response to 9/11, have constructed a pragmatic British-Arab alliance that now makes some pro-Zionists a little nervous.

Much of the tactic of the US and Israeli foreign offices and of their security operations before and since Suez have been directed at countering this Arabist influence, which is accordingly much more pro-European and even ‘nationalist’ (though this over simplifies a complex situation) than other schools of foreign policy thought. 

Within the West, a US-Israeli nexus and a British-Arab nexus may be seen as two sides of the same collaborative coin or as competitors for strategy, depending on where one sits.  Winning influence over the elected British Government, as counterweight to the 'imperial' tradition within the establishment, has to be a constant concern of both the State Department and Israel for different but compatible reasons.

Although played out periodically in the media, these struggles between Middle Eastern factions pass most of the public by. Whether Israel or the Arab world (and now Iran) get this or that advantage in diplomacy is decided ultimately by bureaucratic and political decision-making rather than by public opinion. The Middle East does not seem to win or lose elections. 

We should certainly not make the mistake, however, of believing that ‘Zionist’ influence has collapsed with the rise of the need to do business with conservative states like Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister are very much part of the New Labour ‘liberal-Western’ and Atlanticist tradition. They merely want to bring Israel into line with current regional realities.

Saudi Arabia has moved further into the Western camp under Abdullah than Israel has moved into the 'peace camp'. Saudi policy is concerned with strengthening the conservative Arab position against radical new arrivals on the bloc like the insurgencies and Iran. The UK simply wants Israel and the Kingdom to join one single Western alliance for peace and free trade in the region. This is a view shared by the more enlightened elements in the State Department and, we believe, the Pentagon.

How Much Will Change If Gordon Falls?

Overall, in British politics, there is no machinery yet in place by which wealthy Jewish interests can pressure candidates for office on the question of Israel (as AIPAC has been described by recent US analysts). There is unlikely to be such a machinery in the future simply because the British system does not work like that.

The Tories are unlikely to behave much differently from New Labour in office. Much, of course, will depend on who might become Foreign Secretary in a Tory Government. Hague (the current Shadow) is a classic realist whereas some figures such as Fox are closer to the ideological make-up of a Congressional Republican.

What we can be assured of is that both camps, Arab and Israeli, with one leg in the UK and one overseas, will continue to try and exert formal and informal influence in ways that are not nearly as co-ordinated within their respective camps as conspiracy theorists like to think.

Inter-Jewish rivalries in British politics and inter-Arab diplomatic rivalries tend to weaken both sides' ability to send any coherent message that is much more than a slogan once it leaves the refined language of diplomacy.

The peculiar informal influence of Zionists within the New Labour Right, largely based on the occasional relatively small-scale funding of the Party's leadership groups by independent business interests, is a historical anomaly, but no more so than US and Soviet dabbling in British politics in the Cold War.

Jewish business money does not buy the Party. The politicians in which it takes an interest are already supportive of or at worst indifferent to Israel. Having somewhat overplayed their hand by backing Blair to the exclusion of all alternatives, and in defiance of public anger against his overseas policies, Jewish interests may continue to retain strong informal influence on both political parties through their energy and funding but they will never do so to American levels and they have limited ability to do more than push at an open door.

The real difference between Zionists and Arabs in British politics is an important one. The Zionists are used to democracy and can work within the system as British Jews, whereas British Arabs are relatively disorganised, mostly talkers rather than doers, and over-reliant on the patronage of High Tories. Their overseas elites still think that you can fix British politics by having ‘prince speak unto prince’.

It is a matter of emphasis. British politics is as much run by small cliques within elites as any other system but the Jewish interest understands the mechanics of such operations far better than their Arab counterparts. Arab interests tend to over-intellectualise, over-theorise, over-emotionalise and under-organise. At the higher level, they fail to understand that leading figures are constrained by customs and rules very different to those that constrain a prince.

As the Saudi Visit to London showed recently, a lot of things can be fixed between leaders as national interest issues without either side caring a great deal about what the media and the activists in the street think, but a failure to meet British cultural norms half-way means that every Arab Visit is an opportunity for a foul press. The Israeli Embassy no doubt plays its small part in generating this negativity but Arab diplomats are deluded if they think that every critical article derives from some Zionist plot. There are deeper cultural issues at work here.

Direct elite-to-elite contacts on British soil, without adequate cultural preparation, create the conditions for the release of negative news from interest groups, political embarrassment to the host, puzzled reactions from those not used to being criticized and a sense that any deal is contingent and not based on anything other than temporarily shared economic and security interests.

While Israelis may be paranoid on occasions, they know that in the UK (albeit to a lesser extent than the US) their narrative is embedded in the prejudices and feelings of important elements within the wider culture. In general, Jews are admired (Israelis less so). There is little prospect of the British political system ever working against core Israeli security concerns and anti-semitism does not have to be legislated against to the degree that we see in Europe because such attitudes would be social and political suicide.

Such deals as those with the Saudis may make Israel nervous that it will be ‘sold out’, increasing its paranoia and reluctance to compromise, but British Jews (like British Arabs who should perhaps be listened to far more by their home country elites) are generally forces for compromise, dialogue and reform.

They do have some positive influence back home, albeit that they are likely to be seen as ‘wimps’ by the Netanyahu element and within AIPAC (as Arab reformers can be seen as irrelevant talkers by hardline Baathists and dynasts alike). So the influence is not just one way ... British soft power is happily often targeted at getting British Jews and British Arabs sending compromise or reform signals back to Tel Aviv, Damascus and Ramallah.

The British National Interest

The question for British people who are not of Middle Eastern or Jewish descent is whether money or connections (whether between dynasts or between co-religionists) is exerting undue influence at the expense of the indigenous public interest.

There have been times when not only these interests but the Cold War powers have exerted such undue influence. The fault actually lies with the naivete and lack of vigilance of the British people, press and political class. The real 'scandal' is how particular domestic interests can take money and influence from marginal elements and then use them against their internal enemies. It is not the conduct of British Arabs and British Jews that should be monitored as much as that of cash-hungry British politicians of all parties. 

Sleaze scandals in both parties in the last decade have often had implicit Middle Eastern policy elements that have proved immensely hard to pin down. Yet it is the politicians who lack a moral base far more than anyone who has sought to influence them. 

What often happened in the past was that X or Y needed relatively small sums to sustain a short, sharp campaign against rivals inside the Party or to sustain a credible office function and someone somewhere (always a British citizen) was available with a bit of bunce, never requiring anything in exchange - apparently.  And it is true, nothing is ever asked for ... and no piece of paper would suggest otherwise ...

This informal system is quietly dying off under increasing media scrutiny but the issue (we believe) is less the generosity of the donors and more how political parties and the political system are run in such a ramshackle way that these funds are ever required in the first place.

There are also honest questions to be asked about whether a Briton can properly have an allegiance to the interests of another sovereign territory. There are even deeper questions about what the interests of a sovereign territory are and who should arbitrate on those interests.

The ultimate test is always the question of what is treachery and what is a traitor. Although clear in wartime, questions about divided loyalties between those who live in a territory, become its beneficiaries and then may lobby for the interests of their old homeland or for a homeland’s special interest have been allowed to float in the air without a clear resolution. Perhaps this conspiracy of silence has had nothing to do with the Middle East per se but shows a greater fear of opening up a can of worms related to South Asia.

The UK is no different from the US in seeing various attempts to manipulate its national interest by Middle Eastern and other factions. However, both main Middle Eastern factions should be seen through a different prism in a British context – through different visions of precisely where Israel fits within the West and the relative regard to be given to the security of the Atlantic sea lanes or to the management of Continental Europe, and to ideological issues surrounding the advancement of liberalism and the ‘national interest’.

Israel has some powerful emotional attachments from within important parts of British culture (enough to secure its basic position as a legitimate State in most British eyes), but mainstream policymakers are far more interested in its utility as forward base in preserving or undermining Western liberal values and British national interests than in its rights in other respects.

Its current difficulties within the UK, such as they are, arise entirely from its conduct in undermining those core values and interests because of its worsening treatment of Palestinians and its disastrous incursion into Lebanon. Its influence in the UK will decline or rise to the degree that it addresses the question of Palestine.

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