Jonathan Cook
Declassified UK / January 28, 2025
Why is it only Declassified seeking to hold to account General Basyuk, who oversaw Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, as he meets UK officials?
There have been two stories deeply revealing – in starkly contrasting ways – of the West’s relationship to Israel’s industrialised, militarised slaughter of the people of Gaza over the past 15 months.
Last week, Declassified UK carried out one of the fundamental duties of journalism. Its reporter Alex Morris sought to hold accountable a war crimes suspect evading justice. And not just any suspect.
Morris doorstepped Major General Oded Basyuk as he led an Israeli military delegation through the streets of London in meetings with the Ministry of Defence and the Royal United Services Institute, a UK “security think-tank” with close ties to the British government.
Basyuk, sometimes spelt Basiuk, heads the Israeli military’s operations directorate, whose responsibilities have included the development of the military strategy that guided Israel’s brutal 15-month assault on Gaza.
The International Court of Justice ruled a year ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel has effectively been on trial ever since.
Meanwhile, the ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity – most notably for their policy of blocking aid and starving the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians there.
Basyuk was one of the central figures helping to devise and direct these genocidal acts.
He was also pivotal in overseeing the Israeli military’s invasion and occupation of south Lebanon. Israeli forces have been similarly levelling entire communities there and slaughtering civilians.
In other words, Basyuk is one of the biggest cogs in Israel’s genocidal war machine.
If the ICC finds the nerve to take on the new Trump administration – which is almost certain to sanction court officials for charging Netanyahu and Gallant – Basyuk will be at the head of the queue for an arrest warrant.
Diplomatic immunity
Which leads to a number of conundrums.
Not least, why is a major war crimes suspect such as Basyuk freely wandering the streets of London in the midst of two genocide-related legal cases against Israel?
Given that the ICC can issue arrest warrants in secret, and at short notice, how is Basyuk so confident that he can visit the UK without legal repercussions?
Further, Britain’s universal jurisdiction laws mean serious crimes can be prosecuted in the UK wherever they occurred, and separately from the ICC. A private application for his arrest could have been issued while he was here.
The only plausible answer is that the government of Keir Starmer gave him a gold-plated assurance that he would not be arrested under any circumstances during his visit.
That is precisely what happened back in November when Israel’s now-outgoing military chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, visited Britain to meet officials from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office.
Starmer’s government issued Halevi with diplomatic immunity – a so-called “special mission certificate” – that blocked any possibility of legal redress against him.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, it should be noted, Britain is legally obliged to enforce an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, though it has equivocated about whether in practice it would carry out an arrest of either Netanyahu or Gallant, if put to the test.
Criminal complicity
There are other puzzling questions that need answers.
In the midst of legal cases at the world’s two highest courts against the Israeli military for crimes against humanity, why would the Ministry of Defence think that Basyuk – one of Israel’s highest ranking commanders – was a suitable person to be meeting with and talking to?
What knowledge does Basyuk currently have to share with our own military chain of command that makes it so important to meet with him face to face in London, especially when his visit could potentially drag Starmer’s government into a legal showdown with the ICC or expose a shameful evasion of its legal obligations?
Basyuk’s visit serves as a reminder that the MoD is profoundly implicated in the Gaza genocide – as is Starmer himself.
It has approved the continuing sale of more than 90 per cent of British weapons and components to Israel, including those that have kept Israel’s fleet of F-35s in the air so that they can carpet bomb Gaza.
Additionally, the MoD is believed to have helped ship US and German munitions to Israel through air bases in the UK and from an RAF base in Cyprus, Akrotiri, without which the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children would not have been possible.
As Declassified revealed in October, the UK has been allowing regular secret flights of US special forces from Akrotiri to Israel.
And the MoD has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza, almost certainly with the purpose of supplying intelligence to Israel to help it select targets as it has destroyed most residential properties, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.
A strong suspicion must be that the MoD invited Basyuk not only to deepen ties between the two militaries but to prepare for a renewed British role in the genocide should Israel return to the bombardment of Gaza after the first stage of the ceasefire is completed, as Netanyahu has threatened.
Media silence
And then there are questions for the British media.
How is it possible that Basyuk, a major war crimes suspect, is strolling around London at the head of an official Israeli military delegation in the midst of a genocide investigation by the ICJ and no major British media outlet has shown the slightest interest in doorstepping him, or in asking questions of the government about his visit?
Only Declassified UK – an independent outlet with a tiny fraction of the resources of the BBC, the Guardian, the Times or the Telegraph – has chased him down, embarrassed him by asking him to his face whether he is a war criminal, and drawn attention to his presence in the UK.
It is not even as though we can assume this collective failure by the British establishment media was an oversight, and that for some inexplicable reason their military and security correspondents all failed to learn of Basyuk’s visit, as Declassified UK had done.
Because all these media outlets also ignored the video that went viral of Declassified UK’s Alex Morris challenging Basyuk to his face, “Are you a war criminal, General Basyuk?” and “Are you worried about being investigated by the ICC for war crimes?”
In stark contrast to the Israeli media, which widely reported on this supremely awkward confrontation for Basyuk, the British media has remained studiously silent.
They have not wondered why Basyuk, or earlier Halevi, has been allowed into the UK. Or what assurances Basyuk was given. Or what he and Halevi were here to discuss with the British officials.
Similarly, they have not taken this as an opportunity to focus on another story that so far has entirely passed them by and that Declassified has been at the forefront of exposing: Britain’s deep complicity in Israel’s genocide and the covert role in the genocide of RAF base Akrotiri, on Cypus.
These are not oversights. They are a consistent pattern of failure by the media that indicates one thing only: that these failures are entirely intentional. The British media has conspired with the British government every bit as criminally as the British government has colluded in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Through its silence, the British media has given the government cover to assist Israel in its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
Europe-wide crackdown
The British establishment media has been similarly silent – if for opposing reasons – on another development related to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
While Basyuk was moving around London to meet British officials without fear of arrest or scrutiny, a Palestinian-American journalist was arrested by the police in Zurich at the weekend shortly before he was about to begin a speaking tour of Switzerland.
Ali Abunimah, editor of the veteran website Electronic Intifada, which is dedicated to Israel-Palestine issues, has been a long-standing and trenchant critic of Israel’s decades of abuses of the Palestinian people.
Alongside Declassified UK and a handful of other independent sites, Electronic Intifada has helped to challenge some of the key narrative deceptions Israel has promoted to rationalise the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza – fake news that British media outlets have too often enthusiastically regurgitated.
Abunimah and his team undermined falsified claims of Hamas beheading and baking babies alive during its attack on Israel on October 7 2023, and of mass rapes by Hamas fighters that day.
The site has shone a light too on a secretive Israeli military protocol, the Hannibal directive, that was invoked during Hamas’ attack.
It allowed the Israeli military to kill a significant number of Israeli civilians, including children, to prevent them being abducted. Some of the resulting, horrifying deaths have been attributed to Hamas.
United Nations legal and human rights experts lost no time in condemning Abunimah’s arrest, calling it “shocking” and evidence of an “increasingly toxic” climate in Europe towards free speech.
But the Swiss authorities are not acting in isolation. This is part of a concerted, Europe-wide crackdown on protest against Israel or support for Palestinian rights – and Britain has been leading the way.
Draconian terror laws
Abunimah’s British colleague Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist, had his home raided by London counter-terrorism police in October and his electronic devices seized under draconian terrorism laws.
He is one of several independent journalists being hounded over their criticisms of Israel.
Activists with Palestine Action, and its leader Richard Barnard, have been arrested and charged under similar laws for trying to stop firms in the UK making and supplying weapons to Israel for use in the genocide.
Israeli Jewish activists living in the UK, including Professor Haim Bresheeth and Yael Kahn, both of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, have been arrested in recent months for making speeches criticising Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Another anti-Zionist Jewish activist, Tony Greenstein, was charged in December under the same terrorism laws.
And in a sign that the Starmer government is determined to stamp out wider pro-Palestine and anti-genocide activism, the Metropolitan police used an iron fist this month in cracking down on the latest mass peaceful protest in London against the genocide – one that sought to highlight the heavy slanting of the BBC’s coverage in Israel’s favour.
The police arrested and charged two of the march organisers, including Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, with entirely confected “public order” offences.
The Met also interviewed “under caution” and are investigating the march’s two figureheads: the leftwing MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party.
World on its head
The contrast could not be more clear-cut – or telling.
Starmer’s government is happy to invite foreign war crimes suspects to the UK to learn from them, safe in the knowledge that the British media will do nothing to highlight their crimes or the UK’s complicity in those crimes.
And the Starmer government is equally happy to bully, arrest and charge journalists and peaceful demonstrators opposed to those war crimes, safe in the knowledge that the British media will do nothing to highlight the UK government’s duplicity or its trampling over the fundamental rights of free speech and protest.
The British police leave Israeli state terrorists in peace, while hounding peaceful protesters as terrorists. The world is turned on its head.
But this glaring contrast in treatment – by the government, the Met and the establishment media – serves precisely the same end: shielding Israel and its enablers in the British government from accountability.
All three institutions of the British state have colluded in oiling the wheels of Israel’s genocide machine. All have conspired to keep war crimes suspect General Basyuk out of public view, and make it harder to get him where he belongs: in the dock at The Hague.
All three have played separate but critically important roles in making the genocide in Gaza possible. And for that, they should be put in the dock too.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
