UK Lawyers for Israel sought Israeli help in dispute with Palestine NGOs
A pro-Israel legal advocacy group which is challenging the UK government over its partial suspension of arms sales to Israel asked the Israeli government for help to fight threatened legal action by two NGOs working in the occupied Palestinian territories, Middle East Eye can reveal.
The revelation comes after UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI) said it would seek a judicial review unless the UK government cancelled the suspension of 30 arms export licences, and separately filed a conduct complaint against the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan.
Middle East Eye has learnt that UKLFI privately approached the Israeli government to request assistance in 2019 after it had been accused of making defamatory statements by two organisations, UK-based aid charity Interpal and a West Bank-based NGO, the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P).
Threatened with legal action, UKLFI subsequently issued clarifications about both organisations in 2020.
Despite this, as a result of UKLFI’s work, Interpal - which provided humanitarian aid, education, health and community development for Palestinians in need - lost its banking facilities and gave up fundraising in 2021.
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According to an Israeli government document dated 8 September 2019, seen and translated from Hebrew into English by Middle East Eye, on 2 September the organisation’s CEO, Jonathan Turner, and his wife, UKLFI’s secretary and treasurer Caroline Turner, met a senior official in Israel’s Ministry of Justice, Marlene Mazel.
Mazel was at that time the director of the Counter-Terrorism and Foreign Litigation Division of the justice ministry, a position she still holds.
According to the document, she met UKLFI in her capacity as director of the Cluster of Proceedings in Foreign Countries in the justice ministry’s International Law Department, a unit that handles legal proceedings launched by other countries against Israel.
UKLFI, which was first registered in 2010, describes itself as a “voluntary organisation of lawyers who support Israel using their legal skills”.
At the time of the meeting, UKLFI had received letters notifying it that court proceedings might be separately brought against the organisation by Interpal and DCI-P. Both are discussed in the official Ministry of Justice document seen by MEE.
The document, a summary of the September 2019 meeting marked as having been duly noted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, records that Jonathan and Caroline Turner asked for “assistance in finding or validating evidence that will help them” in case of any legal action brought against UKLFI.
Financial threat
According to the document, the Turners outlined to Mazel the financial threat to UKLFI should it lose such a case.
Its insurance company “will pay 1 million pounds”, the document records, “but Mr. and Ms. Turner will have to pay the rest from their personal account, which will cause them to be in a difficult financial situation”.
Mazel, the document records, told UKLFI “that we cannot promise specific assistance to the association at this point, but in case they have any request they may contact us”.
The document indicates that Mazel played down the prospect of Israeli officials formally providing assistance or acting as witnesses in any legal proceedings.
But it also notes the possibility of “different ways of validating information used in procedures abroad, such as publishing information on a government website”.
Whether there was further contact is unknown.
Jonathan Turner told MEE: “We cannot now recall whether we met Attorney Marlene Mazel on 2 September 2019.”
'We cannot now recall whether we met [Israeli] Attorney Marlene Mazel on 2 September 2019'
- Jonathan Turner, co-founder, UKLFI
MEE asked the Ministry of Justice for comment but did not get a response. It also contacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs but neither responded to MEE’s questions. MEE also asked Mazel for comment but did not get a response.
UKLFI previously worked with the Israeli government in June 2012 when it co-hosted a seminar with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli embassy in London.
Before that, on 17 May 2011, the Israeli foreign ministry released a statement saying that “lawyers in the UK have formed a new group called UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).” It since appears to have been removed from the ministry’s website.
Turner told MEE: “We are an independent organisation and are not linked to the Israeli government.”
Of the 2012 seminar, he said: “It was an excellent seminar, with distinguished speakers and very informative.”
Of the statement about UKLFI posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website in 2011, he said: “UKLFI was formed in early 2011. It seems reasonable for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to have posted a note mentioning this to provide information to anyone interested.”
Defending Israel against ‘lawfare’
UKLFI earlier this month wrote to the British government threatening legal action unless it reverses its decision to suspend 30 out of 350 arms licences to Israel.
Jonathan Turner, who is still the CEO of UKLFI, publicly called the Labour government’s move a “political decision to appease members of the public who hate Israel based on misinformation and biased media coverage of the war. As such, it was a misuse of the power granted by the legislation”.
UKLFI also this month filed a conduct complaint against ICC prosecutor Khan to the bar’s regulatory body in England and Wales.
Khan is currently seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for their conduct of the war in Gaza.
Natasha Hausdorff, UKLFI’s legal director, has described the organisation as defending Israel against “lawfare”, which she has argued is being waged against the state by international institutions.
She has accused the ICC of being used as a “political instrument” and “jumping on the bandwagon against the Jewish state”.
MEE asked Turner whether UKLFI has sought or received any form of assistance, information or advice from, or had any dealings with, the Israeli government regarding the UK government’s suspension of arms exports to Israel.
Turner said: “No.”
MEE asked the same question regarding the ICC and Karim Khan. Turner said: “We have pursued our concerns regarding false allegations made by Karim Khan KC entirely of our own initiative, using information put in the public domain by various sources including Israeli government offices.”
In its complaint, UKLFI claimed that Khan and his assistant, Andrew Kayley, were not complying with their professional obligations” and “not complying with their duty not to mislead the court”.
'The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC underlines that it will not be improperly influenced by any form of threat and harassment in pursuing its Rome Statute responsibilities...'
- office of Karim Khan, ICC prosecutor
Khan’s office responded by saying it would not “engage substantially” with the allegations, while the case is being considered by the court's judges and suggested that the allegations could amount to harassment.
It said: “With respect to the threat to report alleged concerns to the Bar Standards Board, UKLFI must decide what is appropriate, alive to their own ethical responsibilities and their duty not to mislead.
“The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC underlines that it will not be improperly influenced by any form of threat and harassment in pursuing its Rome Statute responsibilities independently and impartially.”
MEE put this to Turner, who replied by pointing to UKLFI’s letter to Khan, saying it is “very fully substantiated and we believe that every statement we make in it is true”.
On Friday, Israel submitted formal challenges at the ICC questioning the court’s jurisdiction in the case and arguing that Khan breached court rules by “failing to provide Israel with the opportunity to exercise its right to investigate by itself the claims raised by the Prosecutor, before proceeding”.
‘Disinformation campaigns’
UKLFI’s meeting with the Israeli government in 2019 came as it faced a threat of legal action from DCI-P.
According to the record of the meeting, DCI-P claimed that UKLFI had sent letters “to donors that entailed claims of relation [a relationship]” between DCI-P and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a major group within the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
The PFLP is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US, Canada and the EU.
DCI-P, which describes itself as an “independent, local Palestinian child rights organization”, is a section of the Switzerland-based Defence for Children International. According to its website, it was registered by the Israeli Ministry of Interior in 1996 and then by the Palestinian Authority in 2003.
According to DCI-P, since 2018 UKLFI targeted it “through a well-orchestrated political and media misinformation campaign aimed at isolating it, seriously harming its reputation and integrity as a human rights organization, and preventing it from receiving charitable donations or raising funds”.
In June 2019, a few months before the meeting with the Israeli justice ministry, DCI-P’s legal team, Bindmans LLP, issued libel proceedings against UKLFI.
In March 2020, the two organisations reached a settlement in the case and UKLFI released a statement clarifying “that we did not intend to suggest that the organisation has close current links, or provides any financial or material support to any terrorist organisation.”
In 2021, DCI-P was one of six Palestinian NGOs working in the occupied territories designated as “terrorist organisations” by the Israeli defence ministry.
The move was widely condemned by international and Israeli human rights organisations, with Amnesty International describing it as a “brazen attack on human rights”.
'May you go from strength to strength'
In a statement following the designation, Khaled Quzmar, DCI-P’s general director, said the organisation had been the target of “delegitimization and disinformation campaigns” which had been “advanced by a network of rising nationalist Israeli civil society organizations and associated organizations outside of Israel, with the support of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs”.
Quzmar added: “These efforts take the form of targeted and organized defamation campaigns based on a range of allegations related to the violation of counter-terrorism legislation and international law. These allegations are erroneous, misrepresent, and distort critical factual or legal elements.”
The other organisation that had threatened UKLFI with legal action, specifically defamation proceedings, was Interpal, once the largest British aid organisation dedicated to assisting Palestinians.
UKLFI engaged in a long campaign to encourage financial organisations into withdrawing banking or donation processing facilities for Interpal.
The meeting with the Israeli justice ministry came less than a month after Interpal’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, had sent a letter to UKLFI demanding that it unpublish two articles it had put on its website making allegations about the charity.
The justice ministry document stated that UKLFI had attempted “to convince credit companies and other paying platforms (like Paypal) to deny Interpal access to their payment services”.
The latter’s campaign against the charity was based on the United States having designated Interpal as a terrorist organisation in 2003. Canada and Australia followed the US’s lead.
But many other countries and international organisations did not, including the United Nations and the UK - where the Charity Commission investigated Interpal three times, each time clearing the group of all allegations of illegal activity.
The third investigation insisted Interpal review their due diligence and monitoring processes as well as break off all ties with a group which the Charity Commission was concerned had links to Hamas. The Charity Commission later confirmed that Interpal had complied.
Several media outlets - including the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle - have been forced to apologise to the charity and pay damages for claiming it was linked to terrorism.
On 21 February 2020, just months after the meeting with the Israeli Ministry of Justice, UKLFI published a statement by Interpal on its website in which the charity’s trustees addressed “a number of defamatory statements” which they said UKFLI had made on its website and Facebook page.
'We were helping people in need. We have been doing it the right way. UK Lawyers for Israel deprived needy people of donations'
- Essam Yousef, Interpal’s founding trustee
Interpal did not proceed with legal action against UKLFI.
But UKLFI’s continued campaigning led to Interpal losing its banking facilities.
The charity’s income plummeted from £6.2m in 2019 to £2.55m in 2020. In April that year, MEE revealed that British bank HSBC was set to block donations to the charity - without citing any reason why.
Interpal lost its ability to raise money in 2021.
UKLFI claimed responsibility for Interpal’s troubles, saying in November 2021 that “Interpal’s loss of banking facilities followed letters from UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) to banks and other financial service providers”.
Essam Yousef, Interpal’s founding trustee, told MEE: “We were helping people in need. We have been doing it the right way. UK Lawyers for Israel deprived needy people of donations. They deprived children of the help they needed.
“If they are British, why do they have to run to the Israeli government when they could have gone to the British government and the Charity Commission, which gave us a clean bill of health?”
UKLFI published a comment on its website from an unnamed senior Israeli intelligence officer in March 2022 praising the organisation for Interpal having ceased its fundraising: “Thanks to your continuous efforts you have achieved the goal that the State of Israel was trying to get since 1997,” the intelligence officer said (Interpal was founded in 1994).
“I stand in awe of your perseverance. May you go from strength to strength!”
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