Not only is the role of pro-Israel partisans in the UK now visible, but their ugly assumptions are under closer scrutiny than ever before<\/p>\n
Back in the 1950s, the US intelligence community coined a term: \u201cblowback\u201d. It referred to the unintended consequences of a covert operation that ended up damaging one\u2019s own cause.<\/p>\n
There are mounting indications that the intensifying campaign by the Israel lobby in the UK against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, is starting to have precisely such self-harming repercussions.<\/p>\n
A campaign of smears<\/strong><\/p>\n In the three years since he was elected to lead the Labour party, Corbyn has faced non-stop accusations that his party has an endemic \u201canti-Semitism problem\u201d, despite all evidence to the contrary<\/a>. Of late, Corbyn himself has become the chief target of such allegations.<\/p>\n Last month the Daily Mail<\/em> led a media mauling<\/a> of Corbyn over disparaging comments he made in 2013 about a small group of pro-Israel zealots who had come to disrupt a Palestinian solidarity meeting. His reference to them as \u201cZionists\u201d, it was claimed, served as code for \u201cJews\u201d and was therefore anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n Mounting evidence in both the UK and the US, where there has been a similar escalation of attacks on pro-Palestinian activists, often related to the international boycott movement (BDS), suggests<\/a> that the Israeli government is taking a significant, if covert, role in coordinating and directing such efforts to sully the…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n