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It is still estimated that over 75% of Conservative MPs, including those in government, are  registered members of the CFI lobby group that supports a foreign, non-NATO power in the Middle East that is a close ally of Russia – Putin and Netanyahu being close political associates.  According to the Israeli Statistics Bureau, 15% of the population of Israel are native Russian speakers. That’s slightly more than 1 million.   Up to one third of all Israeli Jews (2.5 million) have some roots from the former Soviet Union.

The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is a British parliamentary lobby affiliated to the Conservative Party, which is dedicated to strengthening military and political ties between the British Conservative Party and the extremist Right-wing Israeli Likud party.

In 1995 Conservative politician Robert Rhodes James called it “the largest organisation in Western Europe dedicated to the cause of the people of Israel”.

By 2009, according to the Channel 4 documentary Dispatches – Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, around 80% of Conservative MPs were members of the CFI.  In 2013, the Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, called CFI “by far Britain’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group.”

During the past 12 years of Conservative government, the amount of bilateral trade with the state of Israel has multiplied dramatically and includes substantial contracts for both classified military, defence and espionage equipment notwithstanding that Israel is not a member of NATO and should not be involved in Britain’s national security or defence requirements.  Nevertheless, the UK has signed a trade and partnership agreement with Israel, which is now  in effect.

This trade and partnership agreement includes provisions on:

trade in goods – including provisions on preferential tariffs, tariff rate quotas and rules of origin, intellectual property and government procurement.  Tariff rates for bilateral trade in goods between the UK and Israel continue to apply as set out in the agreement. However, in some cases, the non-preferential applied rates may, in fact, be lower because of changes in the UK’s Most Favoured Nation tariff schedule

For the UK Conservative government to have become so closely interconnected with an alleged corrupt Prime Minister of a non-NATO, foreign power in the Middle East that is an extremist, hard-Right, undeclared nuclear weapon state, by allowing it to have become a major defence supplier to the UK, compromises British national security to an extent that far outweighs that of China.  It is an outrage that the security of the state, the British state, has apparently been allowed to have become so compromised when the primary duty of any government is the security of the nation.

It should be noted that Israel is one of the very few countries in the world that is neither a ratified party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the UN nor of the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

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Hans Stehling (a pen name) is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Queen Mary University of London