By David Miller
A UK-based company called Abraham Accords (UK) has promoted normalisation between the Israeli regime and the UAE and Bahrain. It is controlled by two key Zionist lobbyists, one a Conservative and another a Labour – both members of the unelected House of Lords.
Zionist flatlands
Zionists often condemn the critics of Zionism for failing to appreciate the differences between the varying strands within Zionism.
As the controversial Israeli lobby group, the Anti-Defamation League, recently claimed in a report focused on condemning Palestine Declassified, Press TV’s widely-acclaimed weekly show that I produce, we “aim to homogenize and flatten an otherwise ideologically nuanced and diverse set of people, groups, and communities.”
The story of one of those involved in the Abraham Accords company in the UK is a standing rebuke to the idea that these differences within Zionism are of signal political or analytical importance.
The story shows the involvement of a centrist Labour member of the House of Lords in supporting conservative and Islamophobic causes as well as those often identified as being “far left”.
The only thing that unites these causes is their unabashed defence of, or apologism for, Zionism.
Enter Lord Mendelsohn
The centrist member of the House of Lords is Jonathan Mendelsohn. He has been a central fixer in British politics for more than a quarter of a century.
Though his story is mired in controversy, corruption and scandal, he is not well known and has largely flown beneath the radar of British politics.
He has been affiliated with the Abraham Accords (UK), a company created in May 2021 under the name Middle East Forum. It changed to its current name in July 2022. It is not the same as the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, a leading element in the American Islamophobia network.
The company currently has two directors – Lord Stuart Polak and Lord Jon Mendelsohn. The third director was also appointed at the beginning and is still said to have a one-third share in the company.
He is the strategic communication advisor, Will Neal, who according to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, “works with” Pall Mall Communications, a PR firm well known to be contracted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the UAE and to be run by former Foreign Officer spin doctor and UAE lobbyist, Gerald Russell.
Conservative Friends of Israel
Stuart Polak has been the director of Conservative Friends of Israel since 1989 and has been a partner in two Westminster-based lobbying firms - The Westminster Connection (TWS) and Kesher Strategy, and is known as an 'effective behind-the-scenes lobbyist.'
Polak regularly takes leading Conservatives on trips to the Israeli-occupied territories to educate them. “The sceptics invariably return, if not indoctrinated, fully onside,” reports the Daily Telegraph.
In October 2015, Polak was one of 150 signatories to a letter in The Guardian, launching Culture for Coexistence, an organisation that opposed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The Sunday Times reported on Polak's double role as a lobbyist and head of Conservative Friends of Israel in October 2012: As well as heading CFI, a significant party donor, Polak is a key figure in The Westminster Connection (TWC), a political consultancy.
Clients of TWC include Elbit Systems, Israel’s defence electronics giant. Retired Lieutenant General Richard Applegate, Elbit’s British chairman, boasted of his own and TWC’s role in lobbying MPs on behalf of Elbit when he was secretly taped for last week’s report. He claimed that the consultancy could gain access “from the prime minister down”. Applegate was seeking an increase in British spending on helicopter safety, one of Elbit's specialisms.
Polak and Mendelsohn run the company together with the disgraced Conservative MP Liam Fox, who was appointed “Chair” of the organisation in July 2021.
The trio also runs the Abraham Accords All-Party Group. The group does not, however, declare any support from the company, in the official register.
On the face of it, this seems curious. Does the group really derive no benefit from the company which is run by the same people as the group?
The ethical lobbyist and tracist youth group
The Labour lobbyist, Lord Jon Mendelsohn, is a fixer, fundraiser, ‘passionate Zionist and infamous lobbyist’.
In his youth, Mendelsohn was in the racist “socialist” Zionist youth group HabonimDror which has a notable record for producing what has been called the “HabonimDror School of Racist Comedy”.
A 1983 report on a reunion – for members who “participated in the movement's summer scheme in Israel” – stated that “everyone present received a copy of Habonim's Israel camp diary, a reminder of summer scheme memories and mishaps, compiled by Jonny Mendelsohn and Jonny Freedland”.(Jewish Chronicle, 25 November 1983: 28).
Today, Freedland is a key Zionist gatekeeper at the liberal Guardian newspaper. Both Mendelsohn and Freedland were still active as leaders of HabonimDror in 1986.
Zionist student activism
Mendelsohn attended the University of Leeds in the 1980s. In 1989–90, he served as chairperson – the highest office – of the National Union of Jewish Students, a group which is formally Zionist through its affiliation to the World Zionist Organisation.
In this capacity, he was involved in condemning “left-wing antisemitism” at the London School of Economics after a Zionist student group was refused permission to be part of anti-racist week. (Jewish Chronicle 10 November 1989:6)
He also condemned the Islamic Cultural Society of the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) for distributing what the Jewish Chronicle claimed was 'antisemitic literature'.
The student union temporarily banned the Muslim society but took no action against the Zionist student group which had displayed Israeli flags on its stall. (Jewish Chronicle, 13 October 1989: 44)
When the university issued a code of conduct for student societies, the Jewish society refused to agree to it as they “feared [it] might restrict” their activities and “objected to being treated on a par” with the Islamic society.
A later version of the code was rejected by Mendelsohn as “worthless”, and he claimed the university “appears unwilling to act against antisemitism”. (Jewish Chronicle, 3 November 1989:10)
Mendelsohn also claimed that Muslim antisemitism and the distribution of “virulent anti-Israel” literature was “growing” and he advanced that “possible links” to “Hamas are particularly worrying”. (Jewish Chronicle, 12 January 1990:7)
In 1989, Mendelsohn also served as a member of the Board of Deputies Defence and Group Relations Committee, which was a key agency in surveilling and subverting pro-Palestine activism in the UK at the time.
The UMIST incident was discussed by the committee and in its 1989 Annual Report, the Board claimed “extremist Moslem students continued to promote anti-Zionism on British campuses” and that the universities in Manchester “are a centre of fundamentalist activity”.
This was an early road test of the Zionist playbook strategy of claiming criticism of Israel was antisemitic and also of the Zionist conspiracy theory about the existence of something called “Muslim antisemitism”.
It is no surprise to learn that Mendelsohn continued to pursue such interests in subsequent years. Indeed he returned to the UJS as a trustee between 2012-17 and remains on its advisory council.
Tony Blair and the ‘ethical’ lobbying scandal
Mendelsohn first came to public notoriety in the inaugural lobbying scandal of the New Labour years in 1998. He was the “M” in LLM Communications, a firm of “ethical lobbyists” that was exposed as allegedly selling access to Labour ministers.
Mendelsohn had been an adviser to Tony Blair, from 1994, before co-founding LLM Communications, which was bought by PR firm Financial Dynamics in 2005.
Greville Janner, alleged child abuser, and Mendelsohn mentor
The back story of this lobbying role is that Mendelsohn was catapulted into the centre of the Zionist lobby network because of his role at UJS.
- In the early 1990s, just after leaving the UJS, Mendelsohn was the “right-hand man” of leading Zionist MP Greville Janner.(Jewish Chronicle, 30 November 2007: 7) Back in 1997 Janner described Mendelsohn as “a star” who did “much to organise parliamentary support for issues of vital interest to the Jewish community” (Jewish Chronicle, 25 April 1997: 10).
- However, Janner was later alleged to have been involved in serious child sex offences stretching over decades. He was a Labour MP between 1970 and 1997, “a qualified barrister, and former president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews”. He was “charged … with 22 counts of alleged child sexual abuse against nine people, dating back to the mid-1960s.”
- Janner was “not charged with any offenses until 2015, just months before he died without facing a trial.” According to later reports by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, police investigations “were prematurely shut down with key statements deliberately withheld from prosecutors." Janner, in other words, was protected from scrutiny.
- In 1992, Mendelsohn was Director of the Interparliamentary Council Against Antisemitism headed by Greville Janner. In that capacity, he asked the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for help to expand the council. (Jewish Chronicle 16 October 1992). The ADL is the spy agency with close Mossad links that spies on pro-Palestine activists and the left more generally.
- In 1994, Mendelsohn was director of the Britain-Israel Parliamentary Group, a pro-Israel lobby group of some 250 parliamentary members. The leading Zionist businessman and lobbyist Poju Zabludowicz (later, the funder of propaganda group Bicom) was appointed to the board of the group in 1994 indicating the centrality of Mendelsohn to the lobby by that early stage.(Jewish Chronicle, 11 November 1994:14)
- Mendelsohn was also director of the Holocaust Educational Trust in 1994 and was subsequently a director and trustee until 2017 when we was appointed to the chair of the advisory board
Labour Friends of Israel
After the 1998 lobby scandal, in 2002, Mendelsohn was appointed campaign chairman of Labour Friends of Israel. In 2007, he left FD-LLM to return to the Labour Party to become director of General Election resources and its chief fundraiser.
He was later embroiled in Labour’s funding scandal and faced calls to quit after it was alleged that he knew of arrangements of a key Zionist donor David Abrahams, to fund the Labour Party through intermediaries, to the tune of £673,975.
This was a move said by the party leader and then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to be “illegal”.
Business career – gambling and property
Mendelsohn has developed a lucrative business career out of his lobbying business both through lobby advisory activities and directly in business.
He has a significant interest in more than 25 companies
In 2005, Mendelsohn for several months represented a businesswoman “who made a fortune from sex chatlines and online gambling”.
Dubbed the “Porn Princess” by the media, Ruth Parasol, ‘the daughter of a Holocaust survivor’, made her first fortune ‘through an internet sex site before becoming one of the biggest players in the online gaming industry at Party Gaming'(Jewish Chronicle, 23 August 2007).
Mendelsohn continues to be a consultant to RG Advisors, the company established by Parasol.
Mendelsohn has been involved with a number of gambling companies and in May 2021 became chairman of the 888 gambling group which owns the William Hill gambling firm.
888 claims that Mendelsohn “is a highly experienced gambling sector professional with more than 20 years' industry experience” which would put his entry into the field as 2000 at the latest.
His experience includes co-founding Oakvale Capital LLP, “a leading M&A and strategic advisory boutique focusing on the gaming, gambling and sports sectors.”
The Pears family – Zionist landlords
In addition, Mendelsohn is well integrated into the Zionist business elite, holding appointments entailing “significant control” over 25 companies, including at least 17 companies in the Zionist Pears family property empire:
- Drinkline Holdings Limited
- Pears Family Investments Ltd
- Pears Property Ventures Ltd
- Pears Family Industrial Holdings Ltd
- Pears Property Interests Limited
- Orchard Road Properties Ltd
- Orchard Road Reversions Ltd
- Pine Tree Properties Ltd
- Polynation Properties Ltd
- Leafvale Properties Ltd
- North Hill Estates Ltd
- Real London Properties (UK) Ltd
- Sundridge Properties Ltd
- MTD Coln Industrial Ltd
- Table Properties Ltd
- WP Secured Ltd
- Capital Tenures Ltd
In 2002, the Pears family firm William Pears was reportedly listed as the worst landlord in the UK by the BBC consumer program, Watchdog.
The family was “reportedly embarrassed by the show which chose the UK's worst landlord from a fairly nasty shortlist. In their defence, the Pears cited the millions they've given to charity.”
Among the recipients of this “charity” are a wide range of Zionist causes including Islamophobic think tanks Civitas and Policy Exchange, the pro-Zionist “dialogue” charity Forward Thinking, the JLC, UJIA, and Beit Halochem which supports the Israeli Occupation Forces.
Some might think that this activity aggravates rather than compensates for their conduct as landlords.
It is instructive that given Mendelsohn’s Abraham Accords affiliation, the Pears Foundation has also given £175,000 to the Abraham Fund Initiatives, yet another UK group pushing normalisation with the Zionist entity.
Wolfson family, Islamophobia, and illegal settlements
Mendelsohn also has shares in the retailer Next plc, the main business venture of the Zionist Wolfson family. In addition to sharing the business interests of both the Pears and Wolfson family, Mendelsohn also has interests in the lobby groups that they fund.
He is a director or advisor to over 20 policy groups including - as noted above - the Union of Jewish Students and the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust.
Since he was appointed in July 2020 to the latter, the Trust has continued its tradition of funding Islamophobic think tanks such as Policy Exchange, to which it gave more than £2.3 million between 2007 and 2021.
It also gives to a variety of other Zionist groups including the Community Security Trust, JLC and most notably to both Beit Halochem, which directly supports the IDF, and to the Jerusalem Foundation, which is active in ethnic cleansing in East al Quds/Jerusalem.
Weaponising ‘antisemitism’
Mendelsohn has been a proponent of the witch hunt against the British left for many years as we saw in his work in the 1980s with the UJS.
In 2001, he was a founding director of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, a Zionist-funded charity that operates the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism.
Amongst its key funders are his business partners, the Pears family. Mendelsohn is also the trustee of the Linnell Trust, a small registered charity active on “antisemitism”.
Among its declared donors are the Pears Family Foundation and the family foundation of Gerald Ronson, the Guinness fraudster, who runs the Community Security Trust.
His autobiography discloses that he has interesting views about “the rise of Muslim fundamentalism being stuffed down people's throats in mosques and schools.”
During the Jeremy Corbyn years, Mendelsohn was on hand to subvert the leader of the party, including taking part in the famous lynch mob in April 2018, giving moral support to Ruth Smeeth MP in the witch-hunting of Marc Wadsworth, one of the UK’s leading anti-racist activists for doing nothing at all wrong.
Groping ‘hostesses’ and the President’s club
Given his role in subverting party democracy, it is extraordinary to recall he had been on the front bench team appointed by Corbyn.
This came to an end in January 2018 after he attended the men-only Presidents Club dinner, where “hostesses” were allegedly sexually harassed and groped.
Of course, according to reports, he “did not witness any of the appalling incidents described in reports and has unreservedly condemned such behaviour.” Corbyn then sacked him.
The club was forced to close, but it had involved many Zionist financiers and “philanthropists”, including chairman David Meller, a former director of Conservative Friends of Israel and of the Islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange, a significant supporter of arch-Zionist Michael Gove and latterly an apparent Covid PPE contract profiteer.
He was recently appointed to the government post of member of the Board of Trade. Also involved were three Zionist mega-donors:
- Gerald Ronson of the Mossad-linked Community Security Trust
- Len Blavatnik - Music mogul, named Britain’s richest man in 2015, who has funded the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel’s Soldiers
- Poju Zabludowicz, who bankrolled Bicom the pro-Israel PR agency and worked with Mendelsohn in the early 1990s, as noted above
The club had also had been heavily involved in donating to Zionist charities, including the previously mentioned Community Security Trust and the pro-settlement AishHatorah UK.
Left wing Mendelsohn?
In addition to his business roles with the Wolfson and Pears families, support for Islamophobic think tanks and involvement with conservative Zionists, Mendelsohn is also involved in apparently left-wing activities.
For example, he is on the Advisory Council of Justice for Kurds – a group which is supported by the apparently radical Progressive International. The latter sponsored an open letter to European authorities to remove the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party) from the terrorism list.
Progressive International secured over 1,000 signatures from a very wide range of radicals, leftist, communists and others. James Schneider is its Communications Director.
Schneider was formerly the director of strategic communications in the office of Corbyn as leader of the UK Labour Party, an apparent enemy of Mendelsohn.
This might suggest that Progressive International and Justice for Kurds are left-wing organisations. How are we to explain this? A quick examination of the more than 130 fellow members of the Advisory Council suggests that it is anything but left-wing.
The advisors are a roll call of Islamophobes, Neoconservatives, Zionists and hawks, including several former senior intelligence and military figures such as:
- Gen David Petraeus former Director of the CIA, Stanley McChrystal, Former Commander, United States Joint Special Operations Command
- High profile Islamophobes like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Caroline Fourest
- Hardcore Neocons like William Kristol and Thomas Kaplan
- Hardline Zionists like the CEO of the think tank JINSA, Michael Makovsky, and David Harris the CEO of the American Jewish Committee
- Also, there are a number of UK actors like Mendelsohn’s colleague from the Abraham Accords group Stuart Polak, the Zionist Lord Turnberg, Lord Kerr the former permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office and senior military people like Lt Gen Graeme Lamb the Former Director, United Kingdom Special Forces.
What about Progressive International? Is it just an unlikely alliance across the political spectrum or something more suspicious?
Progressive International claims to be “against imperialism in all its forms”. Against that, we can note its support for the PKK and the so-called Rojava administration which is part of the CIA/US occupation of Northern Syria.
It includes the theft of Syrian oil resources. It’s no surprise then that an “anti-imperialist” group like Progressive International is in bed with a hardline neoconservative group since both support US imperial interests in Syria although one attempts to give this a left face.
Do Zionists say ‘No Pasaran!’?
Mendelsohn is also the sole director of a new publishing company called No Pasaran Media, which claims to be radical and to publish “socialist” books.
It will come as no surprise that all of the books so far published including those from “Marxist” authors are at the end of the day Zionist in orientation.
Meta-lobbying
Mendelsohn is married to Nicola who works at Meta/Facebook as Head of Global Business Group, reporting directly to its Chief Operating Officer.
The Daily Mail reported in 2007 that his "number one asset is his feisty wife Nicola", an advertising executive who is a "ferocious networker, whose contacts range from the Prince of Wales to London's business elite".
Like her husband, Nicola Mendelsohn (nee Clyne) was a member of a Zionist youth group – B’nai B’rith Youth Organisation, usually known as BBYO.
“BBYO was where I honed both my leadership perspective, social values perspective, and the importance of organisation,” she says. BBYO teachings “are part of her DNA”, she said: “very much a part of what makes me who I am”.
She joined Facebook in 2013, the same year her husband was appointed to the House of Lords. In October 2019 Facebook collaborated with Zionist lobbyists to produce a guide on “antisemitism”, seeking to censor social media.
Facebook published the guide which was launched by Nicola Mendelsohn, with the Board of Deputies of British Jews and with the Community Security Trust, both of which work closely with the Zionist regime.
Also present at the launch were another Zionist censorship group Hope not Hate and the then MP Luciana Berger, who had been in the mob with Mendelsohn escorting Ruth Smeeth MP to intimidate the Labour Party into expelling Marc Wadsworth, in April 2018.
Nicola Mendelsohn notes that Facebook has also worked with the Antisemitism Policy Trust a group co-founded by her husband and that “we’ve also worked to ban antisemitic stereotypes around things like the collective power of Jews, all sorts of tropes that depict Jews as running the world or major institutions”.
How lobbying works
This is how Zionist lobbying works, Zionists are seeded throughout the economic, political, and cultural fabric of society – sometimes via the agency of only one family unit like the Jon and Nicola Mendelsohn – and can then be called upon to play both ends of any relevant game.
All in all, the case of Mendelsohn shows that the peaks and troughs of Zionism from “right” to “left” are a mirage. What unites all Zionists is Zionism – a commitment to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy.
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