On the evening of Tuesday 13th May, we protested outside the British Museum as it hosted an ‘Israeli’ ‘Independence Day’ celebration, organised and paid for privately by the ‘Israeli’ embassy to Britain. The walls of the Museum were lit up in blue and the ‘Israeli’ national anthem was played, welcoming a guest list which included prominent far right politicians and journalists, individuals with ties to oil and military corporations, British-Irish comedian Jimmy Carr – and, most significantly, the current Minister for Defence Procurement and Industry, Maria Eagle.
For the event to even go ahead in the first place, it had to be kept a secret - the British Museum’s leadership lied to their own staff, and to the public. Such concerted efforts to conceal an event being held in central London make a mockery of any Zionist claims that the public is on their side. It is testament to our will to denormalise and dismantle Zionism on the streets, in our communities, and at our cultural sites that the attendees cowered in shame on the way in. However, we must not claim this as an easy victory. The event ultimately went ahead.
Its guest list offers a rare insight into the inner workings of the ‘Israeli’ embassy and its relations with those in positions of political and cultural power in Britain. It shows the extent of cross-party political support for arming and fuelling ‘Israel’’s genocide in Gaza, as well as providing it with political and ideological cover.
Narrative laundering
The British Museum has always functioned as a meeting point for the ruling class, facilitating the courting and cooperation of corporations and states. Climate groups and culture workers have previously shed light on how the Museum is used as a lobbying hub. In 2015, the Museum hosted a “Day of the Dead festival” to promote its sponsorship deal with BP, at a time when BP was actively seeking to expand its oil and gas operations in Mexico. Protestors from climate and Mexican solidarity groups disrupted the event, condemning the Museum for its complicity with the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Mexican state in partnership with BP.
However, the ‘Israeli’ embassy party appears to be one of the first times a state has held a private event in the British Museum. Tzipi Hotovely, ‘Israel’’s ambassador to Britain, gave a keynote speech, praising Britain’s ties with ‘Israel’ and identifying Iran as “the most dangerous state actor in the world today”.
The guest list was not made public. Among the known attendees were Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, and GB News journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer.1 It is no surprise that the most fervent advocates for a state built on Jewish supremacy and the dispossession of land are those most aggressively pushing nationalistic, anti-immigration hateful speech, rallying support for a vision of Britain that clings desperately to its colonial legacies. Also present were Labour MP and Government minister Maria Eagle, demonstrating the unwavering, cross-party Parliamentarian support for ‘Israel’’s aggressive and genocidal military offensives in Gaza, and Lord Austin, Britain’s trade envoy to ‘Israel’ – a former Labour MP who in 2012 was forced to pay damages to Friends of Al-Aqsa for falsely claiming that they are Holocaust deniers. The US ambassador to Britain, Warren A Stephens, was also pictured at the event. The question of whether IOF soldiers and other senior ‘Israeli’ figures subject to arrest warrants were present remains open.
Jimmy Carr was also seen entering the Museum; some sources have identified him as the compere of the event. Carr is a longstanding supporter of ‘Israel’. He was a signatory of the #NoHostageLeftBehind letter to former President Biden; he has performed standup routines in Tel Aviv; and he even spent two months living on a kibbutz in the 1990s, which led him, in his own words, to “fall in love with [‘Israel’]”. It should come as no surprise that a “comedian” who previously joked that the mass murder of Romani people was a “positive outcome of the Holocaust” would host a party celebrating an ‘Israeli’ statehood built on Nakba and upheld today by the genocide of over 186,000 Palestinians. Carr’s presence signifies the role celebrities have played in normalising ‘Israel’’s genocide in Gaza - and his hurried exit speaks to the fact that siding with ‘Israel’ is becoming more and more disgraceful in the eyes of the public.
The ‘Israeli’ embassy’s secret party, with its attendee list of journalists, celebrities, and politicians from across the political spectrum, reveals ‘Israel’’s efforts to both maintain strategic governmental and media relationships for the purpose of laundering a narrative whose ultimate aim is “tripartite genocide” and the destabilisation of the wider region, including Lebanon, Yemen and Iran.
Maria Eagle: the F-35 jet minister
The event was also an opportunity for ‘Israel’ to secure support for continued arms exports and gas licences – as evidenced by the attendance of Maria Eagle. Eagle is a career politician. Her path to Whitehall began in 1997, when she rode the wave of Tony Blair’s landslide election victory all the way to a safe seat in Liverpool Garston.2 Eagle voted in favour of the war in Iraq and has upheld positions in favour of the nuclear Trident program, which became the subject of her most public disagreement with Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour Party leader.
In the current Government, Eagle is Minister of State for Defence Procurement and Industry. In practical terms, this means that she acts with governmental authority as a buyer and seller of arms for the British state. She plays an active role in maintaining the Government’s relationships with partnered arms manufacturing companies. When Maria Eagle is not celebrating the birthday of settler-colonial states actively engaged in genocide, she can be found rubbing shoulders with the senior management of Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems. She is responsible for the oversight and implementation of the Government’s drive to bolster Britain’s military-industrial complex by any means necessary – including collusion with genocide.
Eagle’s speech at the British Museum event can be seen as an affirmation of Britain’s commitment to arming ‘Israel’, amidst all the public pressure for a total arms embargo. Her boastful remarks about the role of the RAF’s cooperation with ‘Israel’ confirmed the modus operandi of British imperialism. Crucially, though previously questioned, this is the first time a Government minister has openly and directly confirmed the RAF’s role in the genocide. For Maria Eagle to share such guarded information at an invite-only, clandestine ‘Israeli’ embassy party epitomises the British Government’s ongoing failure to disclose the truth to the public. Her attendance at the event, along with her enthusiastic speech, exposes a grave conflict of interest and the flagrant abuse of her Governmental role.
Just hours earlier, and less than a mile away, the High Court had heard GLAN and Al-Haq’s legal challenge against the Government for their violations of international law through the transfer of F-35 fighter jet parts to ‘Israel’. Later that evening, ‘Israel’ bombed a hospital and a refugee camp near Jabalia in Gaza, killing at least 84 people. Was this attack carried out by F-35 fighter jets created with component parts manufactured on British soil, signed off to be exported to ‘Israel’ by Maria Eagle?
What is certain is that Maria Eagle refuses to answer such a question. She is yet to comment on the report compiled by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Workers for a Free Palestine, and Progressive International, which used ‘Israeli’ Tax Authority data to evidence the continuing transfers of arms, weapons, and F-35 parts from Britain to ‘Israel’ since the suspension of key licences. Hansard records show that MPs who have made requests for transparency and clarity over Britain’s role in the production or transfer of F-35 fighter jets have, more often than not, been met by opaque boilerplate answers from Eagle and her colleagues – if they bother to respond at all. For example, on 29th November 2024, Eagle responded to a question from Clive Lewis by stating:
At the request of the US-led F-35 Programme, there were 14 transfers of F-35 components from RAF Marham to Israel between October 2023 and August 2024. The transferred components are the property of the US Department of Defence.
Despite Eagle’s mechanical attempts to absolve herself and the British government of responsibility by citing the US-led global supply chain as a justification for British complicity in ‘Israel’, we know that “following orders” is neither morally nor legally plausible, given the gravity of the situation in Gaza. In an interview with the Guardian, she claimed she had dreamt of becoming an MP from the age of six. Yet Maria Eagle is a long way from a child’s career aspirations now. She is the British political figurehead of a commercial state-to-state relationship that has ensured a genocide has persisted and intensified. She is playing an active role in a ongoing genocide.
BP Museum
Since the launch of Energy Embargo for Palestine, one of our main campaigns has consisted of targeting BP’s £50 million partnership with the British Museum. In our exposé of BP’s supply of oil to ‘Israel’, we wrote about how BP sponsors cultural institutions like the British Museum to enact its “social licence to operate”. This corporate market-integration strategy requires and relies upon individuals who are happy to be wooed by one of the world’s leading climate destroyers – people like Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice. Tice, currently the MP for Boston and Skegness, is a known climate change denier who was previously Reform’s spokesman on energy and foreign policy; his party has accepted donations from fossil fuel interests. Tice was in attendance at the ‘Israeli’ embassy party.
Another attendee with a longstanding relationship to the fossil fuel industry was Stephen Crabb, a former Conservative Party MP and Chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. Though Crabb has spoken in support of green technologies, in July 2022 he accepted Wimbledon tickets as a gift from BP – just five months before ‘Israel’ organised the tender for gas exploration licences off the coast of Gaza.
One of these licences was duly awarded to BP, and was renewed in March of this year. Another licence was awarded to Socar, the Azeri national oil company. Azerbaijan, which supplies 40% of ‘Israel’’s annual oil consumption, and where BP has operated oil fields since 1992, has taken an interest in Syria’s development of its oil and gas fields.
That the guestlist of the ‘Israeli’ embassy party included figures such as Crabb and Tice cannot be seen in isolation from ‘Israel’’s efforts to guard its gas and oil security in the region. The choice of venue – the British Museum, with its close relationship to BP – gives further credence to this.
Just like BP has done, the ‘Israeli’ embassy has used the status of the Museum as a venerated public institution to construct a veneer of legitimacy for its activities. It has used the Museum’s private hire system as a shield behind which it has conducted a diplomatic event, featuring British ministers, leaders of political parties, and journalists, while avoiding public scrutiny. Framing the event as a ‘corporate function’ means that both the ‘Israeli’ embassy and the Museum are able to avoid the record-keeping and transparency mechanisms – official minutes, attendee logs, email correspondence, speech transcriptions, readouts, media coverage – that would usually accompany these sorts of diplomatic endeavours. This further highlights the role of the Museum as a lobbying hub, used by states to avoid accountability.
Confrontation with Zionism
Events like this are nothing new. ‘Israel’’s continued efforts to maintain dependendable relationships with those in strategic governmental and media positions are well-documented. There is strong precedent for Zionist lobbying events being held at reputationally “safe” establishments, with carefully-selected invitations designed to deepen the ties between the British and ‘Israeli’ state apparatuses. The Zionist business investment conference hosted by the RSA in December 2023 – at which then-Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden was ‘Guest of Honour’ – is just one example. The British Museum event was particularly notable for the attendance of Maria Eagle, amidst mounting public pressure on the British government to cease its continued arms exports. The presence of figures like Richard Tice, Stephen Crabb, Kemi Badenoch, and Nigel Farage re-affirms the cross-party political backing for the Zionist project.
Moreover, the repression that we experienced while protesting the event greatly exceeded anything we have experienced during our previous protests. Before our protest even started, the Metropolitan police imposed conditions under the Public Order Act. They then barricaded us with fences, violently snatched at least one member of the crowd, and intimidated participants. Once we were kettled, the police told us that they were “here to make arrests”. This suggests a deep relationship between the Museum and ‘Israeli’ officials, whereby the police were deployed and prepared beforehand to forcibly ensure that the genocide gala went ahead.
This week, we have seen the British government release superficial statements condemning ‘Israel’’s blockade on Gaza and ‘suspending’ talks on a trade deal. Meanwhile, Britain continues to arm Israel, and the likes of Maria Eagle and the British trade envoy to ‘Israel’ are happy to party with Hotovely.
As ‘Israel’ systematically starves Palestinians in Gaza, and as it launches, with full support from Britain and the US, a new wave of attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, we must redouble our efforts to confront Zionism everywhere it appears.
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