Lobby Watch 2 July 2024
Photos of Assaf Kaplan gathered from his now-scrubbed social media and online profile.
Former Israeli spy Assaf Kaplan is still employed by the UK Labour Party during its current general election campaign, The Electronic Intifada can reveal.
We have also learned of Kaplan’s attempt to gain access to a cross-party electoral reform group called Get PR Done, alarming members and administrators of the group who were aware of his background in the Israeli military’s elite cyberwarfare unit.
And in an extraordinary turn of events on Tuesday, the Labour Party threatened legal action against The Electronic Intifada, after we sent them a request for comment.
Yet the party did not dispute any specific statements put to them in our inquiry for this story, and effectively confirmed that they still employ Kaplan during their current election campaign.
Kaplan has remained active in the Labour Party since he was first exposed by The Electronic Intifada, in January 2021. Labour leader Keir Starmer hired Kaplan to help the party influence “events or narratives online” and to “track” Labour members.
Since taking over Labour in 2020, Starmer has obsessively purged the left on the pretext of bogus anti-Semitism allegations – especially against former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn is now running as an independent candidate after he was purged by Starmer, who has attracted millions of dollars worth of Israel lobby donations into Labour’s campaign.
A source inside Labour Party staff revealed on Friday that Kaplan is still employed by the party.
In an email from Labour’s official press account, a party spokesperson wrote that “neither Mr. Kaplan nor the Labour Party accept your allegations of serious wrongdoing” – an official confirmation that Kaplan remains a Labour employee as the party fights an election campaign widely expected to bring it to power.
“Blood on the headset”
Documents unearthed by The Electronic Intifada also show that Kaplan spoke on “how to run a good campaign” at the Jewish Labour Movement’s conference in January this year.
The Israel lobby group’s program for the event described Kaplan as “social organizing manager for the Labour Party.”
This suggests that Labour is now downplaying the surveillance aspect of Kaplan’s role – his original full title was “social listening and organizing manager.”
With close ties to the Israeli embassy in London, the JLM was refounded in September 2015 specifically to fight the then newly elected left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a long-standing Palestine solidarity campaigner.
As The Electronic Intifada first revealed in 2021, Kaplan had been an intelligence analyst in Israel’s deadly cyberwarfare division, Unit 8200.
Unit 8200 officers were exposed by whistleblowers in 2014 as having internally boasted about “blood on the headset” – the X’s they marked after each assassination of a Palestinian that they helped bring about through their pervasive and intrusive surveillance of every aspect of the lives of Palestinians.
Kaplan worked for the military intelligence unit for more than four and a half years – long past the three-year limit of Israel’s ostensibly compulsory military conscription.
An elite part of Israel’s military, Unit 8200 is difficult to enter.
The Israeli army describes 8200 as its “main information gathering unit.”
One of the unit’s key roles, according to the military, is “listening” – the same term Labour used in its job description for the role into which Kaplan was hired.
Members of the unit “are in charge of developing and utilizing information gathering tools, analyzing, processing and sharing of the gathered info to relevant officials,” the military adds.
Fears of spying
What that “listening” amounts to in the case of Unit 8200 was revealed by some of its veterans to The Guardian in 2014.
“Any Palestinian may be targeted and may suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion or even direct physical injury,” one veteran explained.
“Any information that might enable extortion of an individual is considered relevant information,” the veteran added. “Whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife, or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank – he is a target for blackmail.”
Although The Electronic Intifada’s exposé of Kaplan caused high profile outrage in 2021 and even legal moves, the exact nature of the former Israeli spy’s role in British politics has remained unexplained ever since.
The Electronic Intifada can also today reveal that Kaplan’s activities have extended beyond Labour.
Only months after he was appointed to his role, Kaplan briefly joined the private Facebook group run by Get PR Done, a cross party electoral reform campaign.
Get PR Done works to introduce proportional representation as the voting system in Britain’s national elections.
Get PR Done co-founder and former Toronto Star journalist Alan Story told The Electronic Intifada that Kaplan briefly managed to join the private group in February 2021, before another administrator recognized his name.
The organizers were outraged.
“It didn’t take too long to decide: We gotta expel him,” said Story. “Not only have they hired this guy but he’s now spying on our fucking group!”
They swiftly ejected Kaplan, after reading The Electronic Intifada’s reporting, as well as that of others like Middle East Eye.
But Story said the majority of the administrators decided not to make Kaplan’s infiltration public at the time, judging that it would have been intimidating for the group’s members.
“We have a lot of members in the Labour Party,” said Story. “You know what happens to people [who] like to make criticisms of Keir Starmer in the Labour Party: They get evicted.”
*We didn’t want to create that air in the group that … a spy could be reading every message in there,” Story said.
Get PR Done’s private Facebook group and public Facebook page today each have about 3,000 members or followers.
Story said that the group had successfully campaigned for the Labour Party’s annual conference to adopt a position in favor of proportional representation in 2022 (Starmer has since rejected the electoral reform).
Story said that his group learned that Kaplan had also infiltrated “The Labour Party Forum,” a private Facebook group with almost 36,000 members.
Labour Party Forum administrators did not respond to requests for comment.
Legal threat
Both Kaplan and Labour were given a broad outline of the contents and issues under investigation for this story ahead of publication and were asked to comment by a Monday evening deadline.
Assaf Kaplan did not respond to an email requesting comment and did not pick up phone calls on Monday.
The Labour Party responded by demanding that The Electronic Intifada “not publish your proposed story or any allegations concerning Mr. Kaplan pending receipt of our response tomorrow” at midday the following day, Tuesday.
“We reserve the Labour Party’s legal rights and those of Mr. Kaplan in full,” the party stated. “We also reserve the right to provide a copy of this email to the court on the issue of conduct and/or legal costs.”
The Electronic Intifada’s executive director Ali Abunimah responded to Labour, saying the party’s latest effort to intimidate this publication would fail.
He wrote: “Given your reference to potential legal action, I take this opportunity to advise you as clearly and unambiguously as possible that any attempt by the Labour Party by means of actual or implied legal threats to interfere with our publication of any information in our possession will be unsuccessful.”
“If you wish to avail yourselves of the opportunity to provide us with comment for our article you are welcome to do so,” Abunimah added. “You may also choose not to do that. As a courtesy and solely at my discretion, I will extend the deadline until noon UK time on Tuesday, 2 July.”
Labour’s second email the following day was sent 13 minutes later than the party’s own suggested deadline and emphatically marked “not for publication.”
However, The Electronic Intifada made no agreement with the party to keep its communications off the record and is under no obligation whatsoever to do so.
The party asserted that this story would contain “defamatory statements against Mr. Assaf Kaplan,” but did not specify what those could be.
Aside from the legal threats, the party did not respond to any of the substantive questions put to it in spite of The Electronic Intifada extending its deadline to allow it ample opportunity to respond.
Labour has completely ignored The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment on Kaplan in the past.
Israel lobby influence
In February, The Electronic Intifada revealed that Damien Egan, a Labour lawmaker, is married to a former Israeli soldier who recruited members of Unit 8200 to take part in an Israel lobby-run program called Birthright Israel Excel.
Earlier this year, Egan won a by-election – a vote to fill a parliamentary seat that becomes vacant, usually because of a death or a resignation. He is married to software developer Yossi Felberbaum, who helped engineer IT systems for the Israeli military for more than five years.
After our exposé, Felberbaum scrubbed his LinkedIn profile of any mention of the Israeli army.
You can still see the screenshots in our original article and neither Egan nor Felberbaum has commented.
Egan is also strongly linked to the Israel lobby group the Jewish Labour Movement.
With the popularity of the Conservative government sinking to record lows, Labour is widely predicted to win the election on Thursday, making Starmer prime minister in spite of his own dismal approval ratings.
But Labour is facing significant challenges from the left in several key seats around the country – with Israel’s genocide in Gaza the main wedge issue – including in Starmer’s own district.
In October, Starmer infamously declared on national radio that Israel has the “right” to blockade the people of Gaza, cutting off power and water.
This has since cost him votes.
In another February by-election, Workers Party leader George Galloway overturned a 9,500 vote Labour majority to win Rochdale, a seat in England’s northwest with a relatively high Muslim population.
Galloway is a veteran Palestine solidarity activist and lawmaker who was kicked out of Labour in 2003 by then prime minister Tony Blair, after opposing the invasion of Iraq.
Galloway’s party is running candidates all over the country. Several – as well as other independent Palestine solidarity campaigners taking part in the election – have a decent chance of winning.
Starmer has raked in huge sums for Labour from wealthy Israel lobbyist and South African apartheid profiteer Gary Lubner.
When he ran for leader of the party in 2020 Starmer made clear that “I support Zionism without qualification.”
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