Following UK Labour’s election promise to ban weapon sales to Israel, a suggestion asserted by caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shut down intelligence cooperation with Britain surfaced in a report by The Telegraph.
On a visit to London in September, Netanyahu was asked by the British publication whether security cooperation between the two nations would continue if Jeremy Corbyn halted the sale of weapons to the Jewish state and recognized a Palestinian one.
Without going into further details, “What do you think?” was Netanyahu’s response.
The relationship between the two intelligence communities is a close and wide ranging one. The cooperation between Israel’s Mossad spy agency and the United Kingdom’s MI6 and MI5 "has saved many lives - many Israeli lives and many, many British lives,” Netanyahu said in a 2017 BBC interview.
Radicals linked to Iranian-backed Hezbollah were caught stashing tons of explosive materials in 2015 in northwest London in a secret bomb factory. MI5 and Metropolitan Police officers discovered the site thanks to a tip widely believed to have come from the Mossad.
In 2009, Corbyn described Hezbollah and Hamas activists as “friends” after inviting representatives from both terrorist groups to visit the British Parliament as his guests. He later said that he regretted using the “inclusive language.”
The Labour leader’s ties to Iran and Russia have also drawn concern in recent years. When Russian agents were accused of using a nerve agent to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in the UK, his advisors repeated various claims made on the pro-Kremlin RT network about possible British involvement in the attack. Corbyn has given multiple interviews to Iran’s Press TV, a state-run propaganda outlet.
Former head of the Mossad Danny Yatom said that, “there is an unwritten rule between security apparatuses that you do not pass on your allies’ intelligence. If it leaks, then relations might change dramatically.”
During a visit to Israel yesterday, UK counter-terrorism official Jonathan Hall said that Britain can learn a lot from Israel. Hall is an independent actor, who is exposed to all of England’s classified information regarding counter-terrorism in order to evaluate how the system as a whole is functioning.
Hall said that Israel’s new terrorism law expanded how to define terrorism and those who support terrorism in many creative ways that England is keeping an eye on.
For better or worse, should Corbyn become the next British prime minister, his ties and prior actions will likely make cozy intelligence sharing between the UK and Israel history.
Jerusalem Post Staff and JTA contributed to this report.