British Friends of Israel

Part of a Zionist troll network

At their attempted provocation in London on March 23, the Zionist trolls had a turnout of perhaps 50 people. A bizarre foreign-funded network was behind one of the groups in the sparsely populated protest. This was a new campaign group called ‘Our Fight UK’ whose placards and banners can be seen at the tiny provocation. The group appears to have emerged from the so-called ‘October Declaration’ condemning the Palestinian resistance. This was hosted on the website of a new group called ‘British Friends of Israel Limited’ which registered as a company on November 24, 2023, and has Toby Young of the Free Speech Union and Allison Pearson the journalist as directors.

The lead spokesperson for Our Fight is Mark Birbeck, who has a more than three-decade history with a tiny left-wing group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, which became very right-wing. He was the national organiser for one of its front groups Workers Against Racism in the 1990s. Like many of those involved, Birbeck appeared in public as Mark Butler. The group is often referred to as the “LM Network” after the magazine Living Marxism, which contracted its name to LM when the group abandoned Marxism. In the process of moving right, those involved accepted large amounts of cash from the US-based Koch Brothers as well as other corporate behemoths, including Rupert Murdoch. Alumni of the network are all the way through these new groups. For example, as well as Birbeck running Our Fight, Jan Macvarish is a director of the British Friends of Israel. Macvarish was 'press officer' for LM in 1997 and was connected to the myriad of groups spun out of the network including Spiked (for which she wrote) Debating Matters, the Institute of Ideas, the Battle of Ideas and WORLDbytes.

The pair are (or were), like so many other couples in the cultish network, married to each other. Many of the key public figures from the network signed the declaration including:

• Baroness (Claire) Fox of Buckley, author, and director Academy of Ideas
• Professor Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Kent.
• Professor Dennis Hayes, University of Derby
• Brendan O’Neill, Chief Political Writer at Spiked
• Ed West, writer, Substack
• Joanna Williams, author, Director of Cieo
• Dr Norman Lewis, writer and visiting research fellow, MCC Brussels
• Austin Williams, Director, Future Cities Project
• James Heartfield, historian and author

The most high-profile of them is Claire Fox, who is a former MEP and now a member of the House of Lords. Previously, a revolutionary socialist opposed to the Zionist entity, Fox used the pseudonym Claire Foster. This pseudo-radical has now become Baroness (Claire) Fox of Buckley, and a Zionist partisan. Fox was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party back in the 1980s and 90s. In 1988, it created the magazine Living Marxism. It gave lip service to supporting the Palestinians, only publishing six articles with ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine’ in the title in twelve years of existence. Prior to that, the party never produced a single pamphlet or an article in its ‘theoretical journal Confrontation on Palestine, Israel, or Zionism. More than half of the articles (4 out of 6) in Living Marxism were by ‘Daniel Nassim’. He approved of ‘Palestinian liberation’ and wrote that ‘Zionism … will stop at nothing to secure its survival.’ Daniel Nassim was a pseudonym. In reality, the author was called Daniel Ben-Ami. Has he, like so many of his former comrades changed his views on Palestine? Why, yes, he has. Here he is being a good little Zionist asset in London on April 5, standing ‘For Israel.’