All The Warnings We Know That Netanyahu Got

From the mighty Haaretz:

Israeli security agencies and senior officials in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates repeatedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, according to a Haaretz investigation and a series of reports in The New York Times, Yedioth Ahronoth, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. Several of the warnings explicitly concerned the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu rejected the reports, denying that he had received explicit warnings. The prime minister places responsibility for the attack – which claimed the lives of more than 1,100 soldiers and Israeli and foreign civilians and sparked a prolonged war in the Gaza Strip – on the security chiefs who were subordinate to him at the time: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, IDF Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi and Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva. All four have since left their posts.

The first of these warnings was received in early 2023, when thousands protested across Israel against the Netanyahu government's push to reform the judiciary. In March, Netanyahu dismissed former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after he called to halt the judicial overhaul. Thousands took to the streets overnight, blocking major highways. Between March and July 2023, the IDF's Military Intelligence Directorate gave Netanyahu four reports, warning that enemy states and terror groups view Israel as vulnerable because of the polarization in Israeli society and the country's military.

The head of the directorate's Research Division wrote to Netanyahu on March 19 – a week before the first attempt to pass the judicial overhaul legislation and before the attempt to dismiss Gallant – and again on July 16, a week before a key Knesset vote advancing the judicial overhaul. He attached an appendix of raw intelligence reports to each letter, combined it into a brief analysis warning of a looming military confrontation.

"All the actors in the system point to Israel being in a severe, unprecedented crisis that threatens its cohesion and weakens it. ... For our main enemies – Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas – this weakness is part of a linear process ending in Israel's collapse, and the current situation is an opportunity to accelerate and deepen its distress."

An excerpt from one of the IDF's intelligence reports

In May, then-Shin Bet security service chief Ronen Bar told Netanyahu that war against Hamas was "unavoidable." In their meeting on May 21, 2023, following the conclusion of the IDF's operation against Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Bar told the prime minister that the operation was "the first round against the Shi'ite axis. We should prepare for an opening blow, for a round of targeted assassinations. Hamas is the next challenge at our doorstep." Netanyahu rejected the admonition, arguing that Hamas was deterred and telling Bar that Israel had "a strong balance of fear with Hamas."

According to a Yedioth Aharonoth report published in 2024, Bar held another meeting with Netanyahu in July 2023, this time warning that war was imminent. The report states that Bar held a meeting with Netanyahu on the eve of the vote to forbid judges from invoking the reasonableness clause in cases – one of the key elements in the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul plan. Bar told Netanyahu that he couldn't say the exact day and time the war would begin. Bar received Netanyahu's permission to share this intelligence with Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, and subsequently gave him a similar message.

The opposition leader recounted meeting Bar the night before the reasonableness clause was canceled, when he received "unprecedented warnings about the security risks and internal divisions caused by the judicial overhaul." Last week, Bar said he "warned Netanyahu of an impending disaster, and he ignored me." He added, "After three years in which he refused to acknowledge his responsibility and did everything in his power to prevent the establishment of a state commission of inquiry, he is now trying to deflect blame by hurling accusations at those who warned him in real time."

22 days before the attack

In mid-September 2023, former senior Fatah official Sufian Abu Zaida, who mediated between Israel and Hamas, met with Israeli officials after receiving an explicit threat from Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas' leader in Gaza, to cause an "earthquake" if negotiations don't come to fruition. A Haaretz investigation published last month revealed that Israel and Hamas were close to a prisoner exchange deal during the summer of 2023, but Netanyahu postponed a committee session that would approve it. "All that was required at this stage was the approval of the ministerial committee for hostages and missing persons, whose consent is needed for the release of prisoners, especially those serving life sentences," a security source told Haaretz. After the intelligence officials' meeting with Abu Zaida on September 15, Bar briefed Netanyahu in a phone call arranged by Netanyahu's then-military secretary, Avi Gil. Two days later, on September 17, Israel's military and intelligence officials held an urgent discussion on Sinwar's threat, but didn't make any concrete decision.

11 days before the attack

Last month, The Atlantic reported that Egypt's intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, came to Israel 11 days before Hamas' October 7 attacks and delivered a warning that the armed group in Gaza was preparing for a major attack and that the window of opportunity to prevent a disaster was closing. According to the report, which cites Israeli, Egyptian, Arab, U.S. and European officials briefed on his visit, Kamel recommended that Israel grant Hamas economic concessions to prevent a confrontation. He warned that if Israel did not change its course, "Gaza is going to blow up in your faces," the report said, citing a former Israeli official later briefed on the visit.

According to the Haaretz investigation, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed called Netanyahu about 10 days before October 7, warning him that Hamas was planning a "major attack" and urging him to take it seriously. After the Haaretz exposé, The New York Times reported that Sheikh Mohamed mentioned his conversation with Netanyahu in a discussion with William Burns, then CIA director. He told Burns that during the call, he had spoken with Netanyahu about a "looming threat" from Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza. A transcript of a meeting Netanyahu convened with senior Israeli security officials on October 1, 2023, reportedly shows that he told the officials that any Israeli action in Gaza could undermine the prospects of Saudi Arabia establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, a deal he believed was close to being finalized.

48 hours before the attack 

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Egyptian intelligence chief Kamel called Netanyahu days before the attack to warn him of signs of an impending assault from Gaza after earlier Egyptian warnings went unheeded. Kamel then called Netanyahu days before October 7 after the earlier warnings failed to produce a change in Israeli policy, according to the Journal. Egyptian officials continued to warn Israel until as late as 48 hours before the attack, the report said. None of the warnings contained specific information about the timing or scale of the planned assault. Netanyahu denied the reports and said he has instructed to file a libel suit. "In the months preceding October 7, Prime Minister Netanyahu did not meet or speak with Abbas Kamel, who was then head of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, and no Israeli intelligence source conveyed an Egyptian warning to the Prime Minister," he wrote on X.

Lobby Terms

Daniel Tester and Peter Geoghegan write:

The head of a lobbying firm paid by the United Arab Emirates to promote its interests in Westminster is also advising the UK government on how Britain can use sport and culture to project influence overseas, Democracy for Sale can reveal. Roland Rudd, founder and chair of FGS Global, sits on the UK Soft Power Council, which advises the Foreign Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. 

FGS has been registered to lobby British politicians on behalf of the UAE embassy since October 2025, including arranging meetings, calls and emails with MPs, their staff and senior civil servants.  According to its registration, FGS is paid “to promote awareness of the UAE-UK bilateral relationship”. The stated targets for this “political influence” include members of the Commons and the Lords and politicians in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments. 

Rudd’s position puts the boss of a lobbying firm representing the UAE on a government advisory body whose remit includes sport - at the very moment that the UAE’s role in British football is facing unprecedented scrutiny. Manchester City faces the prospect of major sporting sanctions after being found to have breached football’s financial rules over 100 times. The club’s Abu Dhabi owners reportedly held talks with a UK government minister last week, while opposition politicians have raised questions about prime minister Andy Burnham’s dealings with the UAE as Manchester mayor. 

The Gulf state also has a direct stake in UK foreign policy. Britain continues to license arms exports to the UAE, despite widespread allegations - which it denies - that it has supplied weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that has committed mass killings in Sudan’s civil war. 

The UK’s Soft Power Council was launched in January 2025 and is co-chaired by the foreign and culture secretaries. It meets quarterly to offer advice on how to harness soft power “through international interventions in support of foreign policy priorities”.  The council’s two dozen members include representatives of the Football Association, the British Council, Universities UK and Historic England. FGS is the only lobbying firm on the council. 

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Calum Miller MP told Democracy for Sale that “allowing anyone on a foreign government’s payroll to sit on an advisory body shaping UK foreign and sport policies would present a blatant conflict of interest.”

“The public has a right to know whether Roland Rudd raised the UAE’s interests with Ministers and what commitments they gave him. The Government must come clean about what was discussed and agreed behind closed doors,” the MP added.

FGS said Rudd’s position at the consultancy was “always declared in relation to his unpaid public roles”. The Foreign Office said “all appointments to government bodies are subject to an appropriate due diligence process.” 

No record of what was said 

Official records show that FGS has entertained some of the most senior figures in government since it began lobbying for the UAE, including Rachel Reeves, then chancellor, the prime minister’s chief business adviser Varun Chandra, and Antonia Romeo, now the UK’s most senior civil servant. FGS also wined and dined Lord Stockwood, then investment minister, and Jonathan Reynolds, then chief whip and now business secretary, as well as officials at the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade.

Every occasion was logged as hospitality rather than as a meeting, so no minutes were taken and there is no public record of what was discussed. There is no suggestion that the UAE or any other FGS client was raised. “The rules are clear: hospitality that includes a meeting must be recorded as a meeting, with a description of the purpose given,” said Kamila Kingstone, senior policy and campaign lead at Spotlight on Corruption. Until there are meaningful consequences for non-compliance, the public will not have a clear picture of who is influencing their politicians.” 

Tom Brake, chief executive of Unlock Democracy, said: “if senior ministers and officials are sitting down with lobbyists, the public has a right to know what was discussed - especially when the firm involved is working on behalf of a foreign government.” A government spokesperson said ministers and officials “meet and engage with a wide range of external organisations”, and that transparency data “is published in line with the Ministerial Code and transparency guidance.” 

Rudd’s world 

Rudd is one of the best-connected figures in British public relations. He founded the City PR firm Finsbury in 1994, and it later merged into FGS Global. His sister, former Conservative home secretary Amber Rudd, was criticised in 2015 for not declaring her brother’s lobbying business while energy secretary, after her department approved a gas storage project represented by his firm.

FGS, majority-owned by the private equity giant KKR, describes itself as a ‘strategic leadership advisory’ and does not publish a full list of its clients. Transparency disclosures show it has lobbied for KKR, the trading platform Robinhood and Oracle, the US tech company that has won millions of pounds in UK government contracts. FGS has also hired a number of staff from Global Counsel, the now defunct lobbying outfit co-founded by Peter Mandelson. Rudd declined to comment personally. The Soft Power Council did not respond to questions.

Unique Genius?

Nathan Cofnas held a United Kingdom visa when he was at Cambridge, and possibly still does, yet Paul Holden writes:

A Byline Times review of Dr Nathan Cofnas’ social media output has found that he posted comments about “Jewish IQ”, racial purity and miscegenation that appear to be racist and antisemitic, and shared an essay arguing that the “emptying” of Gaza should be seen as “a realistic option”. Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, published a Substack article in July 2026 that accused Professor Jason Arday of plagiarism and “academic fraud” and implied that Arday had invented aspects of his personal biography. The piece set off weeks of media coverage of Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, who resigned on 5 August and was found dead on 14 August.

Cofnas’ posts on Facebook and X could undercut his claims to be engaged in academic inquiry into the role of race and IQ in society. They also raise serious questions about why the media took their cues and framing on Arday from Cofnas despite his objectionable views. In one post about Jewish IQ in August 2024, Cofnas approvingly cited the work of “Nazi psychologists” who “acknowledged Jewish intelligence”. In other posts, Cofnas complained about how “sh*tlibs” in Israel were facilitating “nonwhite immigration” into the country. He also dismissed a “huge %… of US Jews” as Mischlings, a derogatory German term meaning ‘mixling’ or half-breed that was adopted as a legal term by the Nazis to describe individuals with mixed Jewish and Aryan ancestry. Cofnas is Jewish.

Cofnas Saved by Trump

Cofnas was suspended by Ghent University on 20 August, six days after Arday’s death. In a post to X, Cofnas said the university was investigating him “for discriminating against Arday”. However, Ghent lifted the suspension after the Trump administration intervened publicly on Cofnas’ behalf. The day after the suspension, the US Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, publicly condemned it in a lengthy post on X. White said it was an exercise in “scapegoating” and “punish[ed]” Cofnas’ “accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty”. “Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behaviour are not desirable partners for us,” White said.

White announced that the US Government would be “reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University”. Public records show that the US Department of Defense funded research projects at Ghent valued at $869,000. His post was shared by Elon Musk, who responded with an American flag emoji. On 27 August, Cofnas posted to X that Ghent’s rector, Petra De Sutter, had allowed him to “stay”. He said he wished to “personally thank” White, citing White’s “great support which helped bring about a just outcome. I am proud of my country.” The university also clarified that Cofnas’ case remained under disciplinary investigation, and that he would be barred from teaching and required to work remotely for three months.

Byline Times has discovered that Cofnas’ claims against Arday were either flatly incorrect or seriously dubious. Cofnas, for instance, questioned Arday’s claim to have run 30 marathons in 30 days, but evidence from the time, since unearthed, suggest that Arday did. Byline Times has also shown how media coverage of allegations of plagiarism were heavily skewed and ignored the possibility raised by several academic observers that they may have resulted from unintentional errors. Cofnas was dismissed from Emmanuel College at Cambridge in July 2024 after he published a blog post, ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, that argued for “anti-woke” politics and said “there must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”. Cofnas has denied advocating racial segregation.

Posts on Jewish IQ and racial purity

Cofnas is a prolific poster online, including on X and Facebook. A review of his Facebook, in particular, reveals that Cofnas has posted inflammatory and bizarre commentary about Jewish IQ, racial purity and other matters. In August 2024, Cofnas posted a rebuttal to an article and video made by the influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins, in which they argued that it was a “myth” that Jewish people had higher than average IQs. “If you think Jews don’t have higher average IQ, what planet are you living on?” Cofnas asked. “Even Nazi psychologists acknowledged Jewish intelligence.” In November 2023, Cofnas posted a lengthy thread about the IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews and “Jewish success”. Cofnas argued that the stereotype of Jews as “shrewd”, long treated as an antisemitic trope, was proof that there are genuine “obvious personality differences” between Jews and non-Jews. “We know that stereotypes generally have a basis in reality,” Cofnas wrote.

In a post in June 2024, Cofnas argued that the “reported intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews is 72%, and it’s been that level for two generations. Huge % of US ‘Jews’ are 1st or 2nd degree Mischlings who identify as Jewish for oppression points (e.g. Tim Wise), fake Reform converts, or Kanye-style Israelites.” He later identified Tom Steyer, the businessman and failed California gubernatorial candidate, as a “Mischling Democrat”. Mischling was adopted as a legal category by the Nazis for people with mixed Jewish and “German-blooded” or Aryan ancestry under the Nuremberg Race Laws. The German word can mean ‘mongrel’ or ‘half-breed’. In a post from November 2023, Cofnas dismissed Tim Wise, an anti-racist and anti-Zionist campaigner with Russian Jewish heritage, as “one quarter Jew Tim Wise”. Cofnas compared Wise (and other liberal Jews) to “full-blooded Jews” who were “increasingly likely to be orthodox or Stephen Miller-type Trump voters”.

Cofnas also posted about the share of recent immigrants to Israel who are “halachically” Jewish, meaning recognised as Jewish under traditional religious law. “Sh*tlibs in Israel want to do to Jews and Israel what their ideological counterparts in America and Europe want to do to whites and the West,” he wrote in February 2026. “Left-wing politicians like [Ehud] Barak constructed an immigration policy under which the majority (according to one report, 86%) of recent immigrants to Israel are not halachically Jewish.” Later in the thread, Cofnas wrote that “its the same philosophy as ‘anyone can be an Englishman, let’s bring in 20 million Pakistanis because they’ll become English.’”

Posts on Gaza and Zohran Mamdani

In late November 2023, Cofnas shared an essay by the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania titled ‘Israel must crush Palestinian hopes’. Cofnas highlighted a passage claiming that the “international community cares more about the sins of Israel than everyone else in the world combined”. Hanania ended his essay by writing that “eventually I think we can get to a place where emptying Gaza becomes seen as a realistic option both within and outside the region”. 

In November 2025 Cofnas responded to a post featuring an Associated Press photo showing destruction in Gaza City from Israeli bombardment. Cofnas wrote that “for the first time in 2000 years, there are consequences for killing Jews. With that image in their brains, people will think twice before they try to do it again.” In June 2025, Cofnas wrote about Zohran Mamdani, now Mayor of New York: “Mamdani just won the Dem mayoral primary in NYC on the promise to be more anti-white/Jewish and to nationalize grocery stores and housing.”

Interviews with Noah Carl and Amy Wax

In 2024, Cofnas interviewed the British academic Noah Carl on his podcast, The Cofnas Podcast. Carl lost a fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, in 2019 following widespread outcry from academics who accused him of publishing “ethically suspect and methodologically flawed” studies that amounted to “racist pseudoscience”. In October 2024, Cofnas said on social media that YouTube had removed all episodes of The Cofnas Podcast for violating its “hate speech policy”. Cofnas filmed two interviews with Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, in 2024. In October 2025, he posted a photo of himself with his arm around Wax, with the comment “Jewish race realist singularity”.

The university sanctioned Wax in September 2024, stripping her of her named chair and halving her salary for a year, after a faculty hearing board found that she had engaged in “flagrant unprofessional conduct” including a “history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalisations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status”. On a podcast in 2021, Wax said that “as long as most Asians support Democrats and help advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration”.

Almost Nailed On

Peter Carlyon writes:

In theory, there could be few better candidates for a London constituency than Sagal Abdi-Wali. The newly minted boss of Camden council also spent two years as cabinet member for housing, a time in which she told The Londoner “we’ve changed the culture of the council”. But some of her former colleagues aren’t so sure. “I’ve never heard a bigger load of bollocks in all my life,” scoffed one former Camden official who’s worked extensively with Abdi-Wali, when we put this claim to them. 

On Thursday, the 42 year-old Somali refugee is hoping to see off a scandal-hit Zack Polanski to become Holborn and St Pancras’ new MP. Bookies put her as almost nailed on to succeed. Since she looks to be on the brink of victory, we wanted to get to know Labour’s candidate for Holborn and St Pancras — to understand more about who she was beyond the somewhat timid PR drive seeking to propel her into parliament.

We found those keen to praise her sunny personality and commitment to her area. But over days of reporting, and in conversations with over half a dozen current and former colleagues, we also found many people questioning her track record — both at Camden council and in her widely vaunted image as a local charity worker.

Abdi-Wali and I meet in a Costa Coffee near Euston. It’s raining, and with her team in full campaigning mode we have just 15 minutes to speak. She arrives wearing a bright pink and purple hijab and white Adidas trainers. She sits down, smiles warmly, and sets out her offer to the people of Camden: “I know this community really well. I’ve seen the issues that people have here. That’s what made me get involved in local politics, and I’ve been affected by them myself.”

It’s a solid pitch, and one which Camden Labour hope will be enough to overcome any squeamishness over Abdi-Wali’s close ties with Keir Starmer. As chair of his local party for four years, she worked alongside the former Prime Minister and can be seen embracing him upon his arrival at Downing Street in 2024.

Abdi-Wali has spent almost two decades working in and around Camden council. She became a local government officer in the 2000s upon completing her degree in political science from Leeds University. She spent the next 15 years bouncing around different departments before eventually landing in digital services — a role she gave up in 2022 to become the councillor for Camden Square. It’s been – as former housing minister Steve Reed phrased it in an interview with her earlier this year – a “meteoric rise”. In the view of her opponents, though, such a rapid ascension has not necessarily been a good thing.

‘It’s difficult for me to have an opinion about her, because she didn’t turn up to trustee meetings’ 

Andrew Feinstein was a local Labour activist (and before that a member of the African National Congress in South Africa) before spinning out to launch his own party, the Camden People’s Alliance in 2024. This time around though, he’s backing Polanski.

“The idea is to move away from careerist, mendacious politicians,” he tells me — that’s Keir Starmer — and with the former MP for Holborn and St Pancras playing such a prominent role in elevating Abdi-Wali up the Camden Labour Party ranks, he sees many of the same qualities in her. “I don’t think she sees the value in engaging with people except at election time.” 

She frowns when I raise Feinstein’s criticism that she’s being careerist. “I think anyone who’s seen my life and my track record and my career wouldn’t say anything like that,” she says strongly. Abdi-Wali first came to the UK as a child refugee fleeing the Somalian civil war and speaks powerfully about her gratitude to the borough that granted her family sanctuary. “I’ve literally dedicated my life to community service and giving back.” 

While Abdi-Wali’s political career is well-documented, there isn’t much readily available information about her volunteering and community work. On Companies House, she is listed as having previously been a director at two organisations: the Council of Somali Organisations and Voluntary Action Camden (VAC). Her role at the latter, from 2021-23, was to help connect charity workers with potential sources of funding — exactly the kind of community-rooted work her reputation suggests she’d excel at. But, according to one senior figure of the charity, she was hardly ever there. 

“It’s difficult for me to have an opinion about her, because she didn’t turn up to trustee meetings,” this person says. When she did attend, Abdi-Wali would often sit through the online meetings without saying anything. “It’s the regular commitment bit for her that was challenging,” they say reluctantly. By 2023 there was a “restructure” of the trustees and Abdi-Wali left. Of course, that’s only one charity. But one local Labour party insider we spoke to questioned just how much Abdi-Wali really has worked in the local voluntary sector: “I don’t think too many people on the ground see that. Who can back that up? Who’s saying that apart from her?” 

In response to a request for comment, the Labour party refused to provide a list of charities Abdi-Wali has worked with. Instead, a spokesperson said that “Sagal’s 20-year long record of volunteering in her community is commendable. If anyone would like to challenge that, they should say so on the record.” They also provided a quote from Danny Silverstone, a school governor at Primary Hill alongside Abdi-Wali and a fellow volunteer at VAC. “I’ve seen first-hand the substantial time, care and energy Sagal Abdi-Wali has put into her voluntary work, including at Voluntary Action Camden and as a school governor at two local schools.” 

How about housing?

Asked to outline her priorities for Camden, Abdi-Wali tells me that “the thing I’m most passionate about is housing”. She took on the role of housing boss shortly before the housing ombudsman found Camden to have one of the highest rates of maladministration in the country, with council properties plagued by chronic leaks and pitiful response times. Why, I ask, should the people of Holborn and St Pancras elect someone from the same party responsible for these failings? Former Labour MP Emma Dent-Coad announced that she would be backing Polanski over Abdi-Wali, telling the Camden New Journal that “there are huge problems at Camden council” and that “Holborn and St Pancras needs an MP who understands that the current housing model has failed”. 

Abdi-Wali is resolute that she’s changed the culture of the council since taking over. “The number one thing is that we’ve increased the number of residents panels,” she says, though admits that this is “just the start” of what’s needed. However, two former colleagues expressed skepticism about her housing credentials.

“She was a terrible housing chief,” one former official told us, overseeing a surge in the number of households in temporary accommodation — like many London boroughs in that time — and an increase in the number of tenant complaints to the housing ombudsman. A separate former employee in the housing department remembered Abdi-Wali as a “very peripheral figure” who they were surprised to see appointed as the council’s housing lead. 

In the run-up to the election, housing campaigners have also been sharing their dissatisfaction. As we have previously covered, leaseholders in her ward complain that she didn’t respond when they wrote with concerns about their defective homes. Over the weekend, housing safety campaigner Fiona Garrett shared a similar experience in a blog post. Garrett, who set up No More Falls after her son Joshua fell to his death in Holborn due to a faulty railing, said her emails asking to meet the Labour candidate had gone unanswered for weeks — in contrast to candidates from the Greens, Conservatives and Lib Dems – only getting an answer as her case attracted more media attention.

The ming vase lives on

It’s been observed multiple times in this short, frantic election campaign that Labour’s strategy seems not dissimilar from the “ming vase” approach that propelled Starmer into Number 10: keep your head down and stay out of trouble. Despite granting The Londoner an interview, Abdi-Wali’s team repeatedly rebuffed our requests to go out canvassing with her — normally a bread and butter piece of political coverage, at least for a party confident in their candidate’s ability to talk with people on the doorsteps. 

The Green Party has been running a far bolshier campaign, mobilising a small army of eager young door knockers, who have been seen everywhere from Somers Town to Primrose Hill pounding the concrete. Janice, a woman in her 50s who lives in Camden Square, told me that the Greens had posted three flyers through her door and that she’d probably vote for them. She’d received just one from Labour. A stall at the Green Party conference even instructed attendees to hightail it back to Camden to fight the good fight.

Labour’s social media strategy, too, has been restrained. It mostly consists of photos with cabinet members and Abdi-Wali’s straightforward, selfie-shot video diaries cataloguing each day of campaigning. Polanski’s Mamdani-esque approach, it is not. Despite this, several people praise her warmth and down-to-earth demeanour.

Even a scathing article about Camden Labour published by Tribune last week titled ‘The Dark Arts of Camden Labour’ admitted she is “much more charming and socially adept” than Starmer. “She’s this warm person with strong local roots” agreed local Labour party activist and former BBC journalist Martin Plaut, who has been out campaigning with Abdi-Wali. “She’s a Camden girl,” he said, when pressed for more substance. “She’s Camden… she’s just Camden normal.”

Will this be enough? Frankly, it would be astonishing if not: Labour has held onto Holborn and St Pancras ever since it was established in 1983. The borough also has a sizeable Muslim population, with whom Abdi-Wali’s story is said to be going down well at the doorstep. And the election comes right when an ascendant Andy Burnham is battening down voters who may otherwise have swung Green. Punters on online prediction market Polymarket put her chances of winning at over 90%.

The only insight of any personal depth came on the streets of Camden Square — Abdi-Wali’s home turf — when I approached a guy wearing a beanie and asked whether he knew her. “I went to Quran class with her!” he said excitedly. “She’s a good person. A good footballer as well. She used to play attacking mid and she’d bully all the boys off the ball in the playground. She was a baller, you know.” Unfortunately for Abdi-Wali, this fellow doesn’t vote.

Routine Rotation

There is going to be digital ID after all, as the only way to enforce the ban on under-16s from social media, a ban devised as the latest excuse to impose the identity cards and then the digital version that have been the solution in search of a problem since Michael Howard was Home Secretary in a tabloid bidding war with his Shadow, Tony Blair.

They have had identity cards in France since time immemorial, but then we are presumably no longer complaining that dinghy-catchers from there were fleeing a safe country. Britain must also be desperately unsafe now that the USAF has withdrawn from USAF Fairford, raising the question of what that base was any longer for. After all, the American military presence on our shores was supposed to be as vital to our security as the intelligence relationship with Israel that sanctioning the West Bank settlements has apparently destroyed. Not so long ago, the Dukedoms of Edinburgh, York and Sussex were all effectively vacant, leaving the east of this island in fear of an imminent Viking invasion. But this is far worse, extending to the whole Realm.

Although you never know, it may be too late for all of the American bases to be closed by Thanksgiving, which would therefore have become an annual holiday in celebration. But there is plenty of time to make that happen by the Fourth of July. After all, we are to have the Britannia Shield, as Blair would have called it. I mean, really? Kemi Badenoch cannot think of a better name than that? Oh, well, it looks as if it is going to be a literal shield, no doubt with Britannia on it and probably made out of plastic, to be carried around the country and held up theatrically to the sky as if in defiance of some enemy or other, thereby providing an item for the difficult middle of local news bulletins, between the big story and the weather forecast. All very That's Life. Perhaps it should instead be called Esther's Shield?

August Hanning seems to have passed on everything that the BND knew about Russia or Iran, and the Germans are professionals rather than James Bond or Johnny English wannabes, so the fact that we are all still here would seem to blow out of the water both the existence of the threat and the efficacy of its supposed deterrents such as Trident, NATO, and indeed the erosion of civil liberties by such means as digital ID. In that last, what will be the role of the Artificial Intelligence to which were to ascribe personhood while denying it to the unborn child, or to the terminally or chronically ill, or to the inconveniently old or disabled, or to the schoolgirls of Minab, or to anyone at all in Russia, or to Christa Pike, whom God has kept in this life to call the United States, and those elsewhere in West who would restore the death penalty, away from the capital punishment for which the only ever theological argument was that it was permissible if there were no other way of protecting public safety, as is clearly no longer the case, if it ever was?

The Fragrance And The Stink

The Observer carries one obituary per week, and this week’s was of the novelist and screenwriter Peter Prince. Thoroughly deserving, but not the vastly more famous poster girl for assisted suicide, Dame Esther Rantzen. Her death has been underreported compared to the saturation coverage that might have been expected, and which was accorded to that of Sir Jimmy Savile. I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house. Either all is about to be revealed, or every sinew is being strained to ensure that nothing was. Similarly, A.N. Wilson writes:

A nice radio presenter, Kate McGann of Times Radio, said on the morning after Jeffrey Archer’s death that he had his sins and faults but he was not a man to deny this.

She is very young, and clearly was not aware of the fact that in 1986, a Sunday newspaper splashed a headline, “Tory boss Archer pays off vice girl”. (Archer was Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party). The “vice girl” was a woman called Monica Coghlan. Archer had been seen on a London railway station being given £2,000 hush money by one of Archer’s buddies. Archer denied the claims of the News of the World and The People. He sued for libel and got over half a million pounds in damages. The judge in the trial was so besotted by Mrs Archer, a pretty, rather snooty chemistry don, that he told the jury that it was unthinkable that a man with a “fragrant” wife like Mary could ever dally with the likes of poor Coghlan.

It was a deeply ugly episode not only in Archer’s life, but in that of the sleazy Conservative Party. Everyone knew that Archer was lying, and he was eventually had up for perjury. I was Literary Editor of the Standard at the time and he came to one of our Lit Lunches at the Dorchester to promote a book only days before his trial. I introduced him to the audience by saying he did not need to say anything but that anything he did say might be taken down and used in evidence. He was absolutely furious and began to denounce me from the podium, shouting, perfectly accurately, that his books sold in far greater numbers than my own! I am sure this was true, but at the same time, I remain very sceptical about the claims made by Archer that his books sold in tens of millions. 

I attended every day of his trial for perjury. The judge, Mr Justice Potts, said that it was the worst level of perjury he had ever encountered and he warned ‘Lady’ Archer that the things she had said in the witness box were themselves demonstrable falsehoods. While the trial was going on, Archer laid on a weird stage show at the Haymarket Theatre called The Accused. At the end of the play, in which he was standing trial, the audience had to vote whether he was guilty or not guilty. The night I went to the show, he was found guilty by the miserably small audience. I went back to his dressing room and he apologised for the small audience. ‘It’s this rail strike,’ he explained. ‘We had a full house booked but all the trains from the suburbs have been cancelled.’

There was no strike happening that week. Like many of the things he said, it was completely untrue. When we parted, in the Haymarket, I followed him up the street. He darted down a dark alley near Leicester Square. I felt I was in a spy novel, as I quickened my pace as he turned one dark corner, then another. It was clear that he knew all the dingy, sad, dark places where the likes of Coghlan stand in the shadows hoping for business. Next day, I was in court again, as was he, listening to the evidence.

This was a man who had trained as a gym instructor in Oxford and been permitted to use the gym at Brasenose College. This went down in Who’s Who as a man who had been to Brasenose College, Oxford. He also claimed to have attended Wellington College, but he had in fact lived in a village called Wellington which happened to have a school.

Almost everything about Archer was fraudulent. His editor at Hodder and Stoughton, Richard Cohen, told me that his ‘books’ would arrive in the form of a few exercise books full of semi-literate scrawls. Cohen employed a team of English graduates to write the books. Archer had a good idea for plots but was all but incapable of writing. When he died, his editor at HarperCollins spoke of the number of times he tolerated his books being ‘edited’. Evidently, he had learnt to write since leaving Cohen, but it sounds as if what others would call editing others would call rewriting.

Back to the libel and perjury trials. Archer was sent down for four years. The claims made by him and his wife that they had given away the half million of damages to charity was proven in court to be quite untrue. A few very modest donations had been made to the likes of Ely Cathedral restoration fund. No actual charity, ie money given to help people, rather than insure the Archers invitations to concerts, was ever demonstrated.

As for Coghlan, the story is much, much sadder. Archer and the Fragrant Chemist continued to live in the Old Vicarage at Grantchester and to be beloved by Tory Grandees. It had been clear that Coghlan was telling the truth at the libel trial. She told the jury that he had a spotty back, and a decent judge would at that moment have asked Archer to take his shirt off. Archer, and the Establishment, were determined to silence her and when a few thousand used notes in an envelope did not work, she mysteriously died in a car crash. I have no doubt in my mind that Archer was responsible for meddling with the brakes. He was a bad, bad man. Michael Crick asked, ‘The big puzzle is not how Archer gets away with it time and again, but why he is allowed to.’

Yet the Leader of the Conservative Party described herself as heartbroken that he had died. Does she spend even half a minute thinking of Coghlan, a woman whose life was absolutely wretched and which ended violently because of Archer’s criminality? Stig Abell on Times Radio said that Archer’s books had helped many people to love literature. But the books are rubbish. Trash. Archer’s whole life was an uninterrupted series of frauds, lies, deceptions and crimes, including murder. I was reminded of old Malcolm Muggeridge saying that the British so loved old men, that had Oscar Wilde lived to 86, they would have made him Chief Scout.

To Understand British Complicity

Half of one per cent of the population told the census that it had a gender identity different from its sex, no one elected the black or Asian “community leaders”, and the United Kingdom has diplomatic relations with 196 other entities. Some dates are sensitive to transgender people, or to an ethnic minority, or to another country. But half of one per cent of the population does not own the date, much less do its self-appointed voices, never mind a foreign state.

Terrible things happened on 7 October 2023. Those did not include 40 beheaded babies, a baby in an oven, babies and children hanged in a row on a clothesline, babies cut from their mothers’ wombs (in reality an old IDF trick in Lebanon), mass rapes, or the “raped babies” whom David Lammy invented on live television off the top of his twisted head. The world was told that the genocide of Gaza would end when the hostages were released, but all survivors were freed by 13 October 2025, and even the last body was recovered on 26 January this year, yet the genocide continues, not least thanks to British arms and intelligence. Yes, genocide. In 1993, the former President of Bolivia, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of “genocide” for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were the only victims of his “genocide”. Even Benjamin Netanyahu accepts that the death toll in Gaza is more than double that. Indeed, he and his supporters positively revel in it.

Netanyahu at least pretends to think that Hitler had only ever planned to deport the Jews until the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded him to gas them instead, but in fact Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, Winston Churchill redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause, yet the Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. The parties that they founded now govern Israel, having armed Argentina during the Falklands War.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher had not initially wanted to meet Menachem Begin in London, since her generation remembered what he was, and afterwards she expressed her regret at not having stuck to her guns. In 1980, she signed the Venice Declaration of nine European countries against Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In 1981, she denounced the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, calling it illegal. In 1982, she responded to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by imposing an arms embargo on Israel that remained in force until 1994; when Begin wrote to ask her to reconsider, then she did not even reply. What says Melanie Phillips, in whose ideological odyssey that war looms large? In 1988, Thatcher expelled two Israeli diplomats and closed the London Mossad station when one of its double agents had been convicted of terrorism in Britain and when that station had been caught for a second time forging British passports, a practice that was to resurface, with similar but notably less severe consequences, in 2010; no Israeli diplomat had ever before been deported from a friendly state. That all of this was to her credit would not be the view of her flamekeepers.

Normally mild-mannered, my late father could not look at Yitzhak Shamir. No less forthright on such matters was his old Army comrade whom I met again as my Senior Tutor and who is somehow still alive. Had the Irgun, the Lehi and the Haganah succeeded, then my father would never have got his 1939-1945 Star, his Africa Star with 8th Army Clasp, his Italy Star, his France and Germany Star, or his War Medal 1939–1945. There would have been no liberation, first of Italy, and then of France, the Low Countries, and what became West Germany. Enough of the men to have made a difference would have been dead. In 1948, the Irgun, the Lehi and the Haganah formed the Israeli Defense Forces, no Commonwealth spelling there, which on 1 April 2024 killed James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman, unarmed British veterans who were delivering humanitarian aid, and whom the IDF bombed three times to make sure that they were dead, as could not have been an accident. Yet Peter Oborne writes:

Twenty-five years have passed since sociologist Stanley Cohen asked a question that remains just as urgent today as it was when he first posed it. How is it that institutions, governments and ordinary people can know about atrocities, mass killing and human rights abuses, but simultaneously manage to put them out of their minds? His brilliant study, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, drew on Cohen’s own reporting of cover-ups, disappearances and torture in his native South Africa. Yet its examination of the ways in which we pretend to ourselves that terrible events are not taking place was broader, taking in Latin America, the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the Middle East and other examples.

Cohen distinguished between the different ways in which politicians, journalists and others have suppressed knowledge of the truth. He identified what he called “literal denial” - the unblinking assertion that crimes are not taking place. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the United Nations contained numerous examples of literal denial. He said that the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants in Gaza was exceptionally low, that Israel did not block aid to Gaza, and that Hamas should be blamed for shortages.

He also made the nonsensical assertion that settler violence in the occupied West Bank was down to a “handful of young juvenile delinquents”. A Palestinian proverb, Yaktheb al-kithbah wa yusadikaha, roughly translates as: “He tells a lie, and then he believes it.” It describes the mental state of someone who has repeated the same falsehood so many times that eventually he or she has come to regard it as fact. This may explain not just Netanyahu but also the army of apologists who blindly repeat what he says. Cohen also paid attention to a more sophisticated form of denial which does challenge basic facts, but instead sanitises them in ways that seem reasonable or acceptable. He called this phenomenon “interpretative denial”.

Export licences

Channel 4 recently published an hour-long documentary exploring how British ministers have employed the technique identified by Cohen as “interpretative denial”, to sanction Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It is obvious to most people that Israel regularly commits crimes against humanity, with the newest Google Maps imagery showing total devastation across the enclave. Yet throughout this period, British ministers have denied Israeli war crimes. How have they managed this level of cognitive dissonance? The Channel 4 film, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, went a long way to providing the answer. Over the past three years, British firms have exported millions of pounds worth of weaponry to Israel while it flattened Gaza and slaughtered civilians.

All those weapons need export licences. Under both domestic and international law, Britain is not allowed to export weapons to any country which it has reason to suspect commits war crimes. This explains why, for the last three years, the Foreign Office unit that investigates potential breaches of humanitarian law has been busy assessing Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Channel 4 reporter Ramita Navai obtained internal Foreign Office assessments of Israel’s conduct during the early stages of the war, dealing with hundreds of notorious cases. Her investigation shows that again and again, the British Foreign Office failed to hold the Israeli army to account.

Take the case of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl trapped in a car with her dead family after they were shot by Israeli soldiers. She spent three hours on the telephone asking for help. Eventually, permission came for rescuers, but when they did, soldiers shot dead both the rescuers and Hind herself. Unspeakable and hideous - but the Foreign Office assessors cited insufficient evidence to conclude that Israeli soldiers had breached international law. Or take the air strike on Al-Fakhoura school in Jabalia refugee camp in November 2023, which killed dozens of people, including women and children. The Foreign Office did not label this a war crime, even though the United Nations had clearly marked the school as a shelter for displaced civilians, and its coordinates had been given to the Israeli military.

British officials managed to reach the same conclusion after 48 members of the Elian family were slaughtered in Nuseirat, and after Israel targeted a Medical Aid for Palestinians compound housing four British doctors. In only one case did the Foreign Office conclude that even a “possible” breach of international law had taken place. This was the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen charity workers, including three British citizens. Dispatches revealed that even as Israel pledged an “full, urgent and transparent” enquiry into the World Kitchen tragedy, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron was signing off yet another batch of approvals for arms exports - without waiting for the Israeli investigation to be completed.

Convenient findings

There’s little question that these repeated Foreign Office judgments were convenient. Throughout this period, Britain was an enthusiastic ally of Israel, and unwilling to offend the United States. So was the British legal process twisted in Israel’s favour? Channel 4 suggests it might have been. It secured an interview with Mark Smith, the only British official to have resigned over Gaza. His comments were devastating: “We’ve all seen the aerial footage of entire neighbourhoods literally flattened to the ground. They’ve destroyed the vast majority of all residential buildings in Gaza. I’ve never seen anything like it in my career, in my life.”

Smith went on: “So, even without being on the team and having access to the assessments being made, I could see, on the news, in broad daylight, with the naked eye, the most appalling attacks taking place on a daily basis. I mean, almost every single school, and almost every single hospital, in Gaza, has been damaged, or destroyed. How are we justifying our arms exports? If there is even a question whether domestically or internationally that a state that you are selling arms to might be conducting a genocide, then the time to be discussing whether they might be in breach of IHL is way gone.” Smith says he stepped down after witnessing “illegality and complicity with war crimes” at the heart of government.

Channel 4 asked William Schabas, a leading human rights expert who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, to comment on the Foreign Office’s judgement in the Hind Rajab tragedy. He replied: “When a child is killed in this manner, I think there has to be a very strong presumption that normally there cannot be any military justification or explanation for it.”

Channel 4 also spoke to Dearbhla Minogue, a lawyer with the Global Legal Action Network, which alongside the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, took the UK government to court over its weapons exports to Israel. The groups lost, but the case led to the disclosure of the Foreign Office assessments analysed by Channel 4. Minogue says that the British government used a rigged methodology which made identifying Israeli violations almost impossible. According to her, the Foreign Office legal team created a Catch 22 situation. In order to prove that a strike violated international humanitarian law, it required exact information on Israeli intentions. Since Israel refused to provide this information the Foreign Office was unable to reach a conclusion on any incident, meaning that arms sales could continue. 

This brings me to a final point. The Channel 4 investigation has brought into the public domain a mass of fresh information that helps us to understand British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. Yet I have not found a single mainstream media outlet reporting its revelations. The explanation for this media omerta is simple: it’s not just the British government that is guilty of Cohen’s interpretative denial when it comes to the annihilation of Gaza. Most of the British media is equally complicit.