Anas Ambri
Mondoweiss / December 1, 2024
Leaked documents show the extent of collaboration between the pro-Israel legal advocacy group and the Israeli government, in their attempt to “counter” the work of human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
On 10 August 2017, pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) approached the Embassy of Israel in London with a “pitch for business”: a proposal to setup “a rapid response unit to correct false narratives” regarding Israel.
According to the proposal, human rights organizations “such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, routinely publish material condemning Israeli government policy [in Palestine] as disproportionate and discriminatory”.
To counter this, Steven Kay QC and Joshua Kern from London’s 9 Bedford Row International (9BRI) were offering to work with UKLFI “as a response unit to counter” such reports, in order to “develop content capable of responding” to them, at a “granular, detailed, or item by item level”.
This proposal, as well as emails from UKLFI to officials within the Israeli Ministry of Justice, are part of a trove of documents leaked in a hack by a group that calls itself “Anonymous for Justice”. The dataset has since been published by the non-profit journalist collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.
The documents show the level of coordination between UKLFI and the different organs of the Israeli government, despite recent denials by UKLFI of any links.
As part of the proposal, barristers from 9BRI worked with UKLFI to submit briefs to the International Criminal Court (ICC), challenging its jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine.
The leaked documents show how legal advisors from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and top officials from the Ministry of Justice, provided detailed input to be incorporated into the submissions made by 9BRI’s barristers.
This attempt in providing a counternarrative on Israel’s policies in occupied Palestine, which the ICJ recently ruled as apartheid, has been called an attempt to “muddy the waters” by at least one pro-Palestinian international law expert.
When reached for comment, UKLFI’s Chief Executive Jonathan Turner stated that UKLFI is “an independent association with no organisational relationship with the Israeli government”. “From time to time we correspond with some Israeli officials, as anyone would expect given the aims of our association,” he added.
Joshua Kern from 9BRI told Mondoweiss that “9BRi has no relationship, as a Chambers, with the Israeli government.”
Kern explained that, as part of their role as counsel, barristers from 9BRI “provide legal advice, produce reports, and make filings before international criminal courts and tribunals. As part of that work, counsel liaise with relevant stakeholders.”
Mondoweiss also contacted the Israeli Embassy in London, and the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs for comment. No reply was received at time of publication.
UKLFI & GC4I
The idea of establishing a “response unit” in the UK seems to have been first formulated by UK Lawyers for Israel in preparation for the 2014 meeting of the Global Coalition for Israel (GC4I), the leaked documents show.
Mondoweiss previously wrote about the GC4I, a partnership between the Israeli government and pro-Israel NGOs launched in 2010 to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Its 2014 gathering – the first outside Israel – happened in London.
In preparation for the meeting, the Department of International Affairs within the Israeli Office of the State Attorney sent a survey to a number of organisations in the Coalition, asking them to list out what they viewed as the biggest challenges they were facing from the BDS movement.
The organisations, which included UKLFI, were part of the Legal Working Group at the 2014 GC4I event. The group was tasked with “presenting creative solutions for combating delegitimization of Israel in the national and international legal sphere”, according to the draft letter sent to the participants.
Jonathan Turner, then UKLFI’s Chairman, stated that one of the key legal challenges from BDS in the UK was the “propaganda against Israel delivered through student unions, charities, church groups, sometimes schools”.
According to him, this challenge could be addressed using “legal tools” through the “establishment of a permanent organisation to provide legal support” vis-a-vis the challenges he identified.
Such a permanent body would be constituted of volunteer pro-Israel lawyers and “one full-time organiser, who should be a young lawyer or law graduate”. “Estimated cost £50,000 [per annum],” the recommendation stated.
It is not clear if the recommendation was taken up by the GC4I’s Legal Working Group though. A summary document, circulated a month after the GC4I 2014 meeting, does not include Turner’s suggestion.
Enter 9 Bedford Row International
Three years after the GC4I meeting, members of the barristers’ chambers 9 Bedford Row International (9BRI) shared with Jonathan Turner a work proposal “to further Israel’s interests within the field of international criminal law (ICL) and transnational criminal law”. The entire text of the proposal was among the documents recently leaked from the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
Part of the “pitch for business” sent by members of 9BRI to UKLFI, and later shared with senior members of the Israeli ministry of Justice.
The proposal suggested the establishment of “a rapid response unit to correct false narratives articulated by NGOs and intergovernmental organisations” regarding Israel’s discriminatory and disproportionate policies in Palestine.
According to the proposal, the “corpus of material capable of being deployed in international litigation against Israel and/or its citizens at the ICC” was growing.
Such corpus included Human Rights Watch’s 2017 report on “50 years of Occupation Abuses”, and the British Institute of International and Comparative Law’s 2008 report on the Palestine Question, according to the proposal.
“There is an identifiable pattern whereby such reports, when unanswered, form a canon of material which is utilised to build an evidential case against defendants at The Hague [where the ICJ and ICC sit],” the document stated.
The aim was then to set up such a unit to counter the narrative developing from the increased scrutiny into Israel’s discriminatory policies arising from its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The proposal was shared with senior officials in the Israeli ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs, including Dr. Roy Schöndorf, Israel’s Deputy Attorney General for International Law at the time, and Dr. Gilad Noam, his replacement at that post since June 2022.
When asked about the proposal, UKLFI’s Jonathan Turner said that “false information about Israel produced by NGOs and credulously adopted by UN bodies and officials is indeed a major problem.”
“As an association of lawyers supporting Israel, seeking truth and upholding the law, this is a matter of great and legitimate concern to us. We do what we can, with the limited resources we have, to point out some of the inaccuracies,” he added.
Steven Kay QC, who heads 9BRI, told Mondoweiss that the proposal “was within the scope of our professional competences”. “I, in particular, have been involved in many international legal trials where this [i.e. false narratives on facts and law] has been a matter of great concern,” he added.
“Ultimately,” Mr. Kay said, ”this engagement was not taken up by UKLFI”.
Nevertheless, involvement from UKLFI and 9BRI’s barristers in activities organised by the Israeli government increased starting from this point, based on the leaked material.
Public international lawfare
In February 2018, Joshua Kern attended the first edition of the Legal Network Initiative, an anti-BDS conference organised by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in Jerusalem. UKLFI’s Jonathan Turner was also present at the conference.
According to Israel National News, attendees of the conference signed a pact “to defend Israel on every possible legal front in the face of de-legitimization and boycotts.”
An email sent to the Deputy Attorney General Schöndorf right after the conference suggests that the Ministry of Justice was aware of Mr. Kern’s engagement on a project for Anne Bayefsky, another attendee at the conference.
Mondoweiss could not determine what the project in question was. Ms. Bayefsky is an international human rights lawyer and scholar, who has been critical of the United Nations, repeatedly calling it and many of its current experts and former officials antisemitic.
Part of an email thread from February 2018 between Joshua Kern, and senior officials within the Israeli Ministry of Justice, including its former and current Deputy Attorney General for International Law
In a second visit to Israel, this time in August 2018, Mr. Kern met with Dr. Noam, in preparation for legal challenges he was intending to make to the ICC.
Between March and August 2019, barristers from 9BRI submitted a total of four briefs to the ICC as Article 15 Communications, which allow any entity to submit remarks for consideration to the Court.
In one of these briefs, the barristers disputed the ICC’s jurisdiction over Palestine, arguing the Court should defer to Israel’s High Court of Justice instead. In another, they challenged the use of fact-finding reports from international bodies, including from the UN, arguing they “can neither be verified nor corroborated”.
The four briefs acknowledged UKLFI’s assistance in their preparation, and the financial support of The Lawfare Project, a US non-profit which calls itself “the world’s only international pro-Israel litigation fund”.
The briefs did not mention the extent of involvement of senior officials from the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice in their drafting, in terms of content, wording, and even length.
Asked to comment on whether this counted as a failure to acknowledge the support of the Israeli officials, Joshua Kern from 9BRI stated: “it is inaccurate and misleading to state that” there was failure.
“There was no such failure, which implies the existence of a professional duty [to acknowledge this support], in circumstances where no such duty existed,” he said.
Shortly after the submission of these briefs, pro-Palestinian international law expert Victor Kattan published his rebuttals to some of the arguments raised by 9BRI’s barristers.
Kattan dismissed the briefs on the matter of jurisdiction, calling them a way to “muddy the waters” and “an attempt to provide legitimacy to the views of the Revisionist Right that came to power in Israel in 1977, and that has never recognized the national rights of the Palestinian people to establish a state of their own in the ‘Land of Israel’.”
The ICC was also not convinced by the arguments presented by 9BRI’s barristers, and confirmed its jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine. Thanks to this decision, former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was able to open an investigation into the matter in March 2021.
Lawfare to continue
Five years later, the same legal justifications were recently used by the Israeli government and pro-Israeli groups, as they attempted to challenge the request for arrest warrants issued against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Post by Dr. Gilad Noam on 20 September 2024 on his social media profile, suggesting that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel for its request for arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant
On 6 August 2024, barristers from 9BRI submitted a brief to the ICC on behalf of the Israel-based International Association of Jewish Lawyers, questioning the rationale for the arrest warrants request.
Among other things, the brief noted that “the State of Israel [is] a democratic State with a robust and well-respected system of criminal law enforcement, including multifaceted legal oversight mechanisms led by its Attorney General”.
A rebuttal for this latest brief was not needed this time.
On 21 November 2024, the ICC rejected Israel’s challenge, and ultimately issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. In its announcement, the Court stated it “found reasonable grounds to believe” that each of them bear criminal responsibility for potential war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
Anas Ambri is a freelance investigative journalist
