Because they’re part of it. Britain’s national media fails to recognise the influence – and even the existence – of an Israel lobby, our new media analysis shows.
Declassified examined two years of coverage from seven British media outlets and discovered just 16 instances of the term Israel lobby without quotation marks.
Almost all these appearances occur in opinion pieces rather than factual news reports, and none provide detailed exploration of the potential power such a lobby wields.
Usage of “Israel lobby” in quotation marks appears somewhat more frequently, with 26 mentions over two years, commonly employed to quote critics dismissively or imply the lobby’s nonexistence.
For instance, a Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’”. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reported in May 2024 how hecklers accused then-foreign secretary David Lammy of accepting “shady money” from the “pro-Israel lobby”, referring to his lawful £30,000 receipt from Zionist lobbyist Trevor Chinn.
In reality, British businessman Trevor Chinn has provided funding to Keir Starmer and key Labour government figures, and earned an Israeli medal of honour for his “dedication” and “love” for Israel.
Among the seven analyzed outlets—the BBC, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph, and Times—the BBC and Express exhibit the strongest avoidance, with no instances of the unquoted phrase “Israel lobby” found in their content.
The BBC neglects to mention the Israel lobby despite holding frequent meetings with related groups. As Declassified recently uncovered, nine sessions took place between the BBC and Israel-sympathetic Jewish organizations during the first year of the Gaza conflict.
The Guardian includes only five unquoted references to the Israel lobby, three authored by columnist Owen Jones within commentary.
Conversely, the independent Scottish newspaper The National, which consistently critiques UK policy on Israel, noted the Israel lobby 23 times in the two-year period, exclusively without quotation marks.
Israel lobby
The Israel lobby’s reach in Britain is significant. Declassified revealed that a quarter of MPs receive funding from pro-Israel individuals or groups, as do half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet members.
To our knowledge, mainstream media has failed to report on either discovery.
British officials and ministers reportedly engage in undisclosed meetings with pro-Israel lobbyists. Under Starmer, the Foreign Office has maintained numerous contacts with advocacy groups including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the European Leadership Network (ELNET).
Pro-Israel lobbyists influenced the UK government’s ban on Hezbollah in 2019, and the group We Believe in Israel claimed credit for the proscription of Palestine Action in the previous year.
As early as 2009, Channel Four’s groundbreaking documentary Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, hosted by journalist Peter Oborne, exposed the close ties linking the Israel lobby with the Conservative and Labour parties and their efforts to suppress media criticism of Israel.
Compared to other nations, the Israel lobby’s impact on British politics likely exceeds that of any country except the US, far surpassing Russia, which has drawn considerably more media attention.
Friends of Israel
The British press’s reluctance to openly recognize the Israel lobby coincides with nearly 300 mentions of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) or Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) across these seven outlets in two years; many MPs are supporters.
Media mentions of these groups consistently lack discussion on their influence or acknowledgement of their role as a lobbying force advocating for objectives that favor a foreign country, such as opposing arms embargoes on Israel.
The Independent has referred to the “influential Labour Friends of Israel” group three times, and the Times once, without elaborating on the nature of their influence.
Yet CFI is known to have been the largest provider of complimentary overseas trips for MPs in recent years. Both CFI and LFI remain non-transparent about their financial backers. LFI states it relies on “the generosity of members of the Jewish community and those who share our commitment to the State of Israel”, emphasizing that it “does not receive any money from the Israeli government or the Israeli Embassy”.
The Times mentioned the phrase Israel lobby, without quotation marks, only four times over two years, but has referred to Labour Friends of Israel in more than 50 articles. The publication has seemingly not conveyed to readers that LFI may be part of a wider Israel lobby.
Part of the lobby
The scant acknowledgment of the Israel lobby could stem from these seven outlets frequently acting as part of the very lobby they inadequately recognize. The most pronounced is the Telegraph, which regularly publishes content that supports Israel amid its Gaza genocide, unlawful aggression on Iran, and harsh assaults in Lebanon.
Recently, the paper advocated to renew UK military relations with Israel, ran a headline “Israel condemns ‘hateful and racist’ Greens”, and published an article by pro-Israel commentator Jake Wallis Simons titled “The case for Trump attacking Iran”, alongside numerous similar pieces.
Some writings in these outlets insinuate that acknowledging the existence of an Israel lobby amounts to antisemitism. An opinion article in the Telegraph asserts: “Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about how the world works. You think you live in a democracy, it runs, but actually there is this secret invisible system of Jewish power that rules the world through the banking system, the media and the Israel lobby.”
Similarly, the Guardian covered Labour MP Diane Abbott’s May 2024 statement: “She apologised for liking tweets about the influence of the Israel lobby, which she admitted could be interpreted as an antisemitic trope.”
The Guardian has been documented to yield to pro-Israel pressure, promote Israeli messaging, and perpetuate the same “systemic bias, deliberate distortion and deceptive underreporting” regarding Israeli actions as the wider British media, according to reports.
When Damian Egan, vice chair of LFI, was compelled to cancel a school visit in January due to pressure from a pro-Palestinian group, both the Independent and the Times focused coverage on Egan’s Jewish identity, titling: “Jewish MP’s visit to local school cancelled after pro-Palestine campaign”.
Recently, a petition has gathered over 100,000 signatures demanding a public inquiry into pro-Israel lobbying’s impact on UK politics and democracy.
Note – our media analysis covered the period 7 April 2024 to 7 April 2026, using the Nexis media database and conducting website searches of the seven media outlets.
Original article: www.declassifieduk.org
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