����ֱ��

LONDON: In the initial weeks of the war in Gaza, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon, worked day and night at Al-Shifa Hospital as part of a team from the medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres.

During that time, Abu-Sitta regularly posted updates on X about the injuries he was treating. On returning to London, he held a press conference at which journalists were shown some of the footage he had deemed too distressing to post online.

He also shared photographs of some of the children he had treated who had been left with life-changing injuries. Underscoring the scale of suffering, Abu-Sitta said he had performed six amputations on child patients in one night alone.

Israel mounted its military campaign in Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which saw 1,200 killed — the majority of them civilians — and 250 taken hostage.

Twenty-two months later, Israeli operations have destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure, created famine conditions, and left about 60,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gazan health authorities.

After returning to the UK, Abu-Sitta gave evidence to London’s Metropolitan Police Service, which had appealed for anyone who had been to Israel or Palestine to come forward if they had “witnessed or been a victim of terrorism, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.”

That was the cue for an organization called UK Lawyers for Israel, or UKLFI, to act. It reported Abu-Sitta to the UK health care regulator, the General Medical Council, seeking to have him suspended.

At the same time, according to a new report from CAGE International exposing the activities of two influential pro-Israel lobby groups in the UK, Abu-Sitta “became the target of an online campaign to malign his work, resulting in his entry to France, Germany, and the Netherlands being barred when invited to deliver lectures.”

The GMC tribunal threw out the complaint, finding there was “no evidence that there was any potential risk to patients … arising from the concerns about Dr. Abu-Sitta’s social media posts.”

It also rejected the submission that he would discriminate against Jewish or Israeli patients “because the only evidence before the Tribunal on this point suggested the contrary — that Dr. Abu-Sitta did not discriminate against any particular group of patients.”

The tribunal acknowledged “the long history of humanitarian overseas work by Dr. Abu-Sitta,” adding “it was not in the public interest to be deprived of a competent doctor.”

But the campaign against Abu-Sitta is just one of dozens of examples of what CAGE International called a flood of “disingenuous and dishonest complaints of antisemitism, seeking to suppress and criminalize support for Palestine in the UK,” perpetuated by UKLFI and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, or CAA.

In a new report, “Britain’s Apartheid Apologists,” CAGE focuses on the organizations as just two among “the constellation of efforts to provide cover to Zionism” which, it says, “regularly support the apartheid state of Israel.”

UKLFI is a limited company with a separate charitable wing. The CAA, a registered charity, “ostensibly seeks to highlight acts of antisemitism in the UK, but much of its activities are geared toward reporting on those who criticize or oppose Israel.”

CAGE has reported both organizations to the UK’s Charity Commission for allegedly breaching the commission’s code of conduct, “which prohibits support for policies that violate fundamental human rights, and have misused their platforms to shield Israel from accountability.”

Both groups, it says, “regularly instrumentalize regulatory authorities to attack and harass those who criticize and protest against Zionist apartheid and its settler colonial and genocidal activity.

“Through the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, they seek to inhibit and disrupt genuine criticism of Israeli crimes under international law.”

A spokesperson for the Charity Commission confirmed it had “ongoing compliance cases into Campaign Against Antisemitism and UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust. We will assess any issues raised to determine what, if any, role there is for us as regulator.”

The CAGE report accuses UKLFI of “bad-faith lawfare, opacity of finances and governance, and institutional racism.”

The organization, it says, “has become adept at weaponizing professional regulation, bombarding regulators like the General Medical Council, Solicitors’ Regulation Authority, Bar Standards Board, and Charity Commission with vexatious complaints designed to harass and silence Palestinian rights advocates.”

CAGE also questions the source of UKLFI’s funding. “Despite clear evidence of coordination with the Israeli state and its objectives, UKLFI continues to conceal its funding sources, refusing to disclose the financial backers driving its campaign of professional harassment.”

The report labels the CAA as “UKLFI’s less respectable twin, exploiting legitimate concerns about antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel and Zionism through strategic deployment of the dysfunctional, and arguably now totally broken, IHRA working definition.”

The definition of antisemitism framed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, widely adopted by global organizations, has been criticized as a shield to protect Israel.

The report says the CAA’s “relentless pressure on universities, local councils, and public bodies has created a climate of fear in British public life and particularly in academia, where scholars now routinely self-censor Palestine-related research to avoid being smeared as antisemites.”

Like UKLFI, “CAA maintains close ties to both Labour and Conservative Party figures and pro-Israel lobby groups while refusing to come clean about its funding — a glaring lack of transparency for an organization that demands accountability from others.”

The report includes a long list of organizations and individuals targeted by both groups, and that in many cases, “the reactions of the organizations concerned has highlighted the pervasive fear of being labelled antisemitic.”

In February 2023, UKLFI claimed Jewish patients visiting Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London had been left feeling “vulnerable, harassed and victimized” by an exhibition of artwork made by Palestinian children in Gaza.

The decorated plates, part of a collaborative project with the hospital’s community school, were removed after UKLFI wrote to the hospital trust.

Later, a freedom of information request by Jewish Voice for Labour found that the hospital had received no complaints from patients about the artwork.

The CAA, says the report, operates in much the same way as UKLFI, “regularly …  complaining to public and private bodies with claims of antisemitism — complaints which quite frequently amount to a criticism of Israel.”

This “conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Zionism has not only produced a chilling effect on freedom of speech, but in many cases has had devastating consequences on the lives of those who have been impacted by such spurious complaints.”

The CAA made unfavorable headlines in the UK in August 2024 when its chair, Gideon Falter, confronted police officers marshalling a pro-Palestine demonstration and released a video in which an officer described him as “openly Jewish.”

The meaning of the exchange became clear when an edited version of the video revealed the officer was simply trying to prevent Falter provoking marchers, for his own safety.

“The stunt,” says CAGE, was “an attempt to bring down (Metropolitan Police chief Mark) Rowley, following his failure to rein in and/or ban the national Palestine demonstrations, as Falter and the CAA had been calling for since at least November 2023.”

CAGE says the evidence in its report “underscores the profound and systemic role played by UK Lawyers for Israel and the Campaign Against Antisemitism in perpetuating a climate of censorship and institutional complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime.”

London-based CAGE International was founded during Ramadan 2003 as CagePrisoners, highlighting “the status and whereabouts of prisoners seized under the war on terror.” It describes itself as “an independent advocacy organization that aspires to a just world.”

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said “there is a coordinated, long-term campaign to prevent proper and free discussion of the situation facing Palestinians so that it becomes harder to discuss and stand up for Palestinian rights, to talk about the crimes committed against them, the violations of international law, and even the genocide.

“Even carrying a Palestinian flag or expressing solidarity with Palestinians becomes subject to attack.”

Groups such as UKLFI, he said, were “trying to shut down the debate” and there were “widespread false accusations of antisemitism, whether it’s calling the UN antisemitic, the pope antisemitic, or the BBC antisemitic — that is all part of this campaign of intimidation.”

It was, he added, “thoroughly scurrilous, but it also undermines the very legitimate campaign against actual antisemitism.”

Caroline Turner, director of UKLFI, told Arab News the organization received messages from “hundreds of worried and frightened informants in many fields including education, local government, medical, legal, the arts, travel, sport and retail, who are intimidated and distressed by various antisemitic or anti-Israel actions.”

UKLFI, she added, “do not make frivolous or malicious complaints to suppress pro-Palestine voices. We believe in freedom of speech if it is lawful and avoids antisemitism and harassment.

“Unfortunately, there have been many examples of professionals who have potentially committed criminal offenses by expressing views supportive of proscribed terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, or expressed antisemitic views on social media.”

The CAA did not respond to a request for comment.