We need to talk about freedom of speech, sovereignty, and foreign interference

TetleysTLDR: The summary

Let’s call out the hypocrisy of Western political elites and their supporters, especially on the right, who scream about foreign interference unless it’s from Israel. Let’s ask why it’s OK for that Israel, through lobby groups like AIPAC in the US and Labour Friends of Israel in the UK, is allowed to exert undue influence over domestic politics, suppressing dissent, and shaping policy to support its war crimes in Gaza. 

And yet, the tide is turning younger generations and even parts of the MAGA right are starting to question why a foreign state has such power, especially after incidents like the killing of an American journalist in Gaza. The unchecked influence of Israel following Gaza has shone a light down our corridors of power and what it sees isn’t pretty.  

This isn’t about antisemitism: it’s about unaccountable foreign influence and the silencing of criticism in the service of imperial power – but even on the right the silence is breaking, and people are waking up. 

TetleysTLDR: The long bit 

The MAGA crowd in the US and their counterparts in Britain’s far-right ecosystem never seem to shut up about free speech, national sovereignty, and taking back control. They rage against foreign influence, demand border security, and posture endlessly about the Constitution or Magna Carta, depending on which side of the Atlantic they’re frothing from.  But when it’s Israel that's running a Merkava through the very fabric of our sovereignty: a foreign state openly lobbying, funding political candidates, and shaping domestic policy, and funding the silencing of critics, we’ve been deafened by their silence. Not a murmur.  Not a peep.  Not even a meme.  Until now. 

The killing of an American journalist in Gaza, the public funding of a genocide, and the realisation that this influence isn’t benign, has started to cut through even to them.  And if they're waking up, the centre cannot hold much longer.  Let’s be honest: if this kind of state actor interference came from Russia, China, or Iran, there would be absolute uproar.  Sanctions. Outrage. Emergency debates.  Front-page hysteria.  We rightly wouldn’t tolerate it.  We’d call it what it is, an attack on democracy.  

So why is it acceptable when the foreign state is Israel?  Why is the lobby protecting it treated not as a threat, but as a trusted insider, allowed to bankroll candidates, write talking points, and dictate red lines across our political landscape?  

The answer, of course, is that the interference doesn’t challenge power,  it reinforces it. It doesn’t threaten empire, it enables it.  And so our media looks the other way, our politicians bite their tongues, and our institutions stay silent.  But the public is no longer playing along.  

For decades, the cost of criticising Israel in the West was career death.  Question its occupation, its apartheid system, its bombardment of civilians and you risked being denounced as an extremist, an antisemite, a threat to civilised society.  But something has shifted. In the United States, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, once the most feared lobby group in Washington, is starting to lose its grip.  And across the Atlantic, its British counterpart, Labour Friends of Israel is beginning to feel the tremors. 

In the US, AIPAC’s power was once so total it barely needed to lobby.  It simply existed.  Presidents, senators, and representatives fell in line.  But that era is fading.  Young Americans are asking the question that was always supposed to be unthinkable: why is a foreign government exerting this much control over our democracy?   

The breaking point came with Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed over 57,000 people and the tally is climbing at an uncomfortable rate.  Whole families erased.  Schools, hospitals, and bakeries bombed.  Medical workers and journalists targeted.  Entire neighbourhoods razed to the ground.  The Israeli military, backed by billions in US and UK arms, has created what UN officials have described as a 'graveyard for children'.  And what has AIPAC done during this horror?  It has spent tens of millions attacking any US politician who dared call for restraint.  It has pumped vast sums into congressional races, ousting progressives like Jamaal Bowman and trying to silence others like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush. These are not fringe radicals.  These are sitting members of Congress who represent the will of their constituents, and who are being replaced by lobby-approved clones backed by the Israeli government’s unofficial cash machine.  

But this time, something different happened.  Instead of fear, there was fury. Because the death toll didn’t just include Palestinian civilians, it also included American journalists.  When Sayfollah Musallet, an American journalist was murdered by the Israelis, despite being clearly identified as press, even the usual right-wing outrage machine paused.  Suddenly, even some of the MAGA crowd started asking uncomfortable questions.  Not out of moral clarity, perhaps, but from a raw sense of national affront.  How, they asked, can a foreign government kill an American citizen, a journalist no less, and suffer no consequences?  How can billions of taxpayer dollars fund the bombs that killed one of our own?  And why is there no accountability?  The usual neocon talking heads scrambled to reassert the narrative.  But the cracks were visible. 

In online forums, talk radio, even Fox News comments sections, the tone was shifting.  For once, the slogans about 'America First' were being taken literally. And the target wasn’t China. It was Israel.  Or more precisely, the unquestionable, untouchable special relationship between Israel and the US government, maintained and enforced by AIPAC.  

AIPAC’s response was silence, then spin, then scapegoating.  But the spell had broken. The illusion of moral superiority, of shared democratic values, of Israel as 'the only democracy in the Middle East'  it all rings hollow when you bomb journalists, starve civilians, and then use your influence to ban the outrage back home.  

And here’s the part no one in the UK wants to talk about: we’re not bystanders in this.  We’re collaborators.  Our political class has its own AIPAC, not in name, but in function.  It’s called Labour Friends of Israel.  And while it might sound like a slightly awkward networking group, it holds immense power over both the Labour leadership and the party’s foreign policy.  

Not long ago, any Labour MP who spoke up for Palestinian rights was labelled an antisemite, not because they harboured prejudice, but because they dared challenge the UK’s uncritical support for a nuclear-armed state that has maintained a military occupation for 57 years.  

Let’s be absolutely clear.  Real antisemitism exists and must be fought wherever it appears, but that fight has been hijacked by those who weaponise the charge to shield a government committing atrocities.  In Britain, the Labour right have turned the IHRA definition of antisemitism, with its vague conflation of criticism of Israel with bigotry into a tool of political repression.  It was never about protecting Jews. It was about protecting Israel.  And now, Keir Starmer, the self-styled 'forensic' leader has turned the party into a grotesque parody of accountability. 

His silence during the Gaza genocide has been total.  He supported collective punishment, something that as a human rights lawyer he knew was a war crime. He ordered MPs to shut up about the war.  He sacked ministers who joined ceasefire marches.  And behind him stood Labour Friends of Israel: clapping, nodding, writing the lines.  The British public, like their American cousins, are asking: Who the fuck are these people? Why do they have so much power? And why is our foreign policy being written in Tel Aviv and rubber-stamped in Westminster? 

^{You can tell the fibre of of person by the friends they keep:  Labour Friends of Israel have spent  ten of thousands of pounds in trips to the Middle East since October 7th.  This one with Luciana Berger, Peter Prinsley, Kevin McKenna and Cat Eccles was in May at the same time children in food queues were being handed opiate laced flour or were been shot by snipers in food queues.  Posing in Jerusalem with Baby-killer in Chief, Isaac Hertzog.} 

In June 2025, [Can't name them because our Government are wankers] a direct action group targeting Israeli arms factories, was officially proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the Labour government.  The same government that supports arms sales to a country under investigation for war crimes.  Ask yourself this: who benefits?  This isn’t about Jews.  It’s about power.  It’s about lobbying networks that act as enforcers for a foreign state, manipulating policy, silencing dissent, and punishing solidarity. 

"If any other country wielded this kind of influence over Parliament, there would be uproar.  But because it’s Israel, we must pretend it’s impolite or even racist to point it out".  

The dam is cracking.  The younger generation sees through the lies. They see how the language of human rights is twisted to justify occupation. They see how 'democracy' is abused to excuse ethnic cleansing.  They see their own politicians Labour, Tory, Republican, Democrat, grovelling before foreign lobbies while ignoring the people they claim to serve. 

And the lobbyists know it. That’s why they’re panicking. That’s why they’re flooding elections with dirty money, banning protest, criminalising dissent, and smearing their critics. Their power doesn’t rest on truth. It rests on silence. 

That silence is ending.  We must say it now, clearly and without fear:  AIPAC in the US, and Labour Friends of Israel in the UK, are not benign cultural clubs. They are political instruments of a foreign state currently engaged in war crimes. They distort democracy. They subvert justice and they have no place in a political system that claims to be free. 

This isn’t just about Palestine.  This isn't about antisemitism.  It’s about democracy itself and whether our future belongs to lobbyists, arms dealers a foreign nation up to its neck in war crimes, or to the people who vote our leaders into power. 

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