MIND GAMES CHARLES BRENDON is taken for a ride by BICOM – Britain’s foremost pro-Israeli lobby group
TO THE CASUAL observer, there is something unnervingly shady about BICOM. With the type of soulless name bestowed upon fictitious, demonic biotechnology conglomerates and a stated aim of “over time [bringing] about a significant shift in opinion in favourof Israel” in Britain, images of anonymous, scheming ideologues pulling Machiavellian strings seem to leap from its every glossy ‘briefing paper’. Founded in 2001, the organisation possesses every asset required of a US-style political lobby group – from a slick website to heaps of cash.
To the undoubted delight of conspiracy theorists everywhere, there is more: not only does BICOM engage in domestic lobbying against purported “media and political hostility” towards Israel, it has – since 2001 – been flying small parties of British student journalists to the world’s most divisive region to “see for themselves” what all the fuss is about. Thus, the reasoning evidently goes, the foreign correspondents of 2015 will demonstrate a little more “balance” in their Middle Eastern coverage.
Accepting an invitation to embark upon one such trip was a decision made only after lengthy deliberation. Most of us are (knowingly or otherwise) subject to near daily efforts to mould our understanding of the world – be it via election propaganda, prevailing economic dogma or partisan news editing. Yet willingly to expose oneself to what looked like five days of unidirectional, deliberate manipulation threw up both moral and intellectual dilemmas: would I emerge a brainwashed, committed Zionist? What kind of obligations would accepting so generous a ‘freebie’ generate? Would my actions forever be noted – my career purposefully obstructed – were I to stand firm as a principled ‘lefty’? Yet BICOM is in a strong position. It is rare for a student to be offered an all expenses- paid trip to the local curry house, let alone to the region most central to current geopolitics. Throw in breakfast with Her Majesty’s man in Tel Aviv, dinner with prominent British foreign correspondents in Jerusalem and a meeting with Israel’s deputy defence minister (BICOM certainly doesn’t suffer from its lack of official ties to the Israeli government) and the phrase “once in a lifetime” begins to jar with instinctive reticence. Indeed, one wonders if the thousand of pounds spent transporting, feeding and “educating” us are unavoidable given BICOM’s aims – after all, how many UK students would be willing to attend a domestic-based Zionist seminar on Israel’s future?
Nonetheless, assembling at Heathrow was an uneasy experience. The atmosphere was akin to that of a Louis Theroux documentary – the four students present were all aware that BICOM’s representative (a sharp yet worldly London postgraduate named Erica) wanted primarily to change our minds, so treated her with a tentative mixture of suspicion and curiosity. It was here that the mode of interaction to govern proceedings began to be established: friendly conversation on menial topics, peppered with more loaded political exchanges – a model upheld staunchly by the trip’s endearingly bellicose Israeli co-ordinator, Dr Jonathan Spyer (who was to meet us on arrival in Tel Aviv).We landed in Israel at 5am on a grey Sunday morning. The “programme” was to start at nine. None of us had succeeded in getting much sleep.
It is always tempting to see ulterior motives behind every act of the agenda ridden (when wiley French statesman Charles Talleyrand died in 1838, Prince Metternich is said to have remarked: “I wonder what he meant by that”). Perhaps the timetable BICOM prepared for our trip accommodated its busy speakers simply in accordance with their own scheduling preferences. Yet it was notable that our first visit was to Herzliya’s Inter-Disciplinary Centre (IDC) – Israel’s only private university, established ten years ago to counter an alleged left-wing bias amongst the country’s other higher education institutes. There – on the site of an old army barracks – students are given the privilege of an educational environment where party political debate is banned and lectures on negotiation skills are given by esteemed former army generals. There, we were presented with an academic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So far, so predictable.
That the week’s schedule presented us with a “balanced” picture of the situation was unquestionable – so Jonathan assured us, ad nauseam. In fairness to him and to BICOM, this was certainly true in a narrow sense: from an affable if wholly irrational extremist settler to a Labour party politician partly responsible for the Geneva peace accords, few sectors of Israeli society were permitted to pass us by.Yet using the IDC as a springboard for the rest of the trip seemed geared at pre-empting this deluge of opinions: there, academics taught us the “official line” – how Yasser Arafat had launched the Second Intifada unprovoked, how Israel had never in its history embarked upon a war of aggression, how suicide bombers are a product entirely of the Palestinian education system. It was the implied rational benchmark, against which we were intended to gauge the validity of all future viewpoints. It was for the most part devoid of subtlety.
Over the next few days we were duly “shown” Israel. Here was an ordinary, western country trying to mind its ordinary, western business in the face of the despotic Arab world that would have it driven into the sea. The security barrier was admired, both physically and statistically (as deputy defence minister Zeev Boim explained, the lack of recent bombings vindicated Ariel Sharon’s decision to put “hard life” before “no life” – a pity about the former, mind); the state of the economy’s hi tech sector was lauded; the Israeli army’s concern for Palestinian life noted. From all informed parties, both within and without the Israeli government, the failings of our arrogant, liberal British media were spelled out to us.
Special vitriol was reserved for the BBC. Danny Seaman – fiery director of the government press office (and a man who works to the accompaniment of Fox News) – spat at us of the “institutionalised anti- Semitism amongst the British elite”, resulting in the likes of Barbara Pleat using the Corporation as a platform for describing her tears at Arafat’s funeral. Indeed, the Pleat example seemed to pervade all discussion of the beeb – testament either to the impact a single online report can have upon an entire nation, or a general paucity of empirical support for the frequent allegations of partiality. The Guardian, inevitably, was an object of similar hostility (Suzanne Goldenberg was, according to Seaman, “a liar”), whilst mere mention of the words ‘Robert Fisk’ to Jonathan was sufficient to initiate a half-hour debate.
And it was this barely-concealed anger, more than anything, that caused it to click. Far from a sinister, manipulative instrument of raw Israeli self-interest, BICOM’s programme was exhibiting little beyond simplistic nationalist frustration – it was a by-product of Israel’s overwhelmingly defensive national mindset, whose accompanying self-righteous indignation prompts the view that “if only the world could see things from our perspective, they’d understand why we act as we do”. Thus there was no need for a Palestinian independence campaigner to add to the “objective” tapestry weaved under Jonathan’s scrutiny – such a piece would be irrelevant to the exhibition around which we were earnestly being escorted. The trip was not so much about brainwashing as trying to appeal to common values.
IT DIDN’T WORK, of course. For all the insistences we heard that any western country would act identically when faced with a similar terror threat, or that unilateral action was the only way to proceed in the absence of a viable Palestinian partner, no speaker was ever going to convince British students to assume Israeli national priorities. So, for instance, it was perfectly possible to understand why the Israeli army believes it must perform incursions into the West Bank, but not to support such actions; it was perfectly possible to see that the infamous security barrier does prevent suicide bombings, without considering this the sole relevant criterion in assessing its worth. BICOM’s fundamental weakness lies in failing to realise that an irreconcilable difference does exist between British and Israeli values: the passionate sense of nationalism so central to the latter is almost entirely absent within our singularly self-depreciating realm – certainly in academic circles. Thus, ironically, the central thrust of its campaign is doomed to founder upon the very emotion that inspired it.
There are doubtless those in Britain that look at Israel’s continued defiance of international law, look at the blind eye turned towards it by the United States and look at the power of the Israeli lobby in Washington (AIPAC – the largest pro-Israel pressure group in the US – has an annual budget of $33.4m with which to influence congressional affairs), and duly fear the day such weighty interest groups begin to exercise their influence on these shores. Yet if BICOM’s attempts at winning round a handful of student journalists revealed anything, it was that the lobby’s intellectual grounding is far less secure than it itself believes. For fear of disappointing the conspiracy theorists, it was more fuming than shady.
