Care in the Community (February 1997)

Webster’s leaflet reminds people that Britain’s Public Order Act specifically prohibits the operation of any “para-military body which is organised and/or trained and/or equipped for the purpose of achieving political objectives by means of physical force” (the Act makes equally illegal any body giving “reasonable apprehension” of being engaged in such activity.)

Webster quotes an interview with one CST officer, who confirmed that the CST was involved in collecting information on groups seen as threatening the safety of the Jewish community. “The Board of Deputies still deals with the political defence of the community,” said this unnamed officer, “but we deal with the ‘hands on’ stuff.” (He also argued: “Our role is to back up the police, who help us train our people and with whom we work very closely.”)

Webster sees a link between the activities of Gestapo-type organisations like the CSO and the downfall of British government officials like David Mellor, who courageously and very publicly — before the lenses of British television newsreel cameras — tore strips off an Israeli Defence Force general whose soldiers were manhandling unarmed Palestinian children; not many weeks later, Mellor was forced to resign from the British government after hidden microphones and cameras revealed that he

was engaged in an extra-marital affair. [Next victim: Robin Cook, Britain’s current and no less outspoken foreign secretary?]

The popular British author and Daily Telegraph columnist Auberon Waugh and the respected American writer Noam Chomsky have both expressed their outrage at finding this unofficial British Gestapo-organisation compiling dossiers on them. (Waugh ran into a Board of Deputies of British Jews employee at a health farm; the young lady blurted out to him, “We’ve got a file on you!”)

ALL OF THIS raises matters of serious concern: the Board of Deputies of British Jews openly avows that one of its aims is to further the interests of a foreign state, namely the State of Israel.

Victor Ostrovsky, former denizen of the latter’s secret service The Mossad, revealed in his memoirs that the organisation had recruited three thousand British Jews as sayanim (Hebrew: auxiliaries), and that these have provided one hundred safe houses in the Greater London region for use by The Mossad agents engaged on their nefarious activities against Britain: Ostrovsky referred particularly to their kidnapping from London of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who has been

held in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons for twelve years for revealing in The Sunday Times that his country was stockpiling nuclear weapons.

On Feb. 2, 1997 The Observer reported in London that the CST, operating from within the headquarters of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, operated a “sophisticated intelligence system collating information on the community’s enemies” and that it offered an “investigative service.” The CST was claiming, reported the newspaper, to be “a Jewish neighbourhood watch — with a little bit added.”

There was a trenchant response next week in the same newspaper, not from Britain’s radical right-wing but from the extreme left, who claimed that they were victims of the Board’s less than sophisticated forms of harassment.

“This ‘little bit added,'” wrote Julia Bard, of the Jewish Socialists’ Group, “is the surveillance and harassment of members of the Jewish community itself, especially those on the Left, who take issue with the political positions expressed by the self-proclaimed leaders of the community.” “Many Jews,” she continued, “resent the bullying style of the CST.”

Members of her group and other organisations had been prevented from entering a range of “public” events policed by the CST and its forerunner, the CSO, including a Holocaust commemoration, meetings about Nazi war crimes and an Israeli film festival, on the hollow pretence that they presented a security risk.

Neville Nagler, then deputy president of the Board, had explained in a local newspaper that it was the job of the CSO to keep apart “people who have lost relatives in the Holocaust” and “people with a political view.”

ALL OF THIS raises matters of serious concern: the Board of Deputies of British Jews openly avows that one of its aims is to further the interests of a foreign state, namely the State of Israel.

Victor Ostrovsky, former denizen of the latter’s secret service The Mossad, revealed in his memoirs that the organisation had recruited three thousand British Jews as sayanim (Hebrew: auxiliaries), and that these have provided one hundred safe houses in the Greater London region for use by The Mossad agents engaged on their nefarious activities against Britain: Ostrovsky referred particularly to their kidnapping from London of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who has been

held in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons for twelve years for revealing in The Sunday Times that his country was stockpiling nuclear weapons.

On Feb. 2, 1997 The Observer reported in London that the CST, operating from within the headquarters of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, operated a “sophisticated intelligence system collating information on the community’s enemies” and that it offered an “investigative service.” The CST was claiming, reported the newspaper, to be “a Jewish neighbourhood watch — with a little bit added.”

There was a trenchant response next week in the same newspaper, not from Britain’s radical right-wing but from the extreme left, who claimed that they were victims of the Board’s less than sophisticated forms of harassment.

“This ‘little bit added,'” wrote Julia Bard, of the Jewish Socialists’ Group, “is the surveillance and harassment of members of the Jewish community itself, especially those on the Left, who take issue with the political positions expressed by the self-proclaimed leaders of the community.” “Many Jews,” she continued, “resent the bullying style of the CST.”

Members of her group and other organisations had been prevented from entering a range of “public” events policed by the CST and its forerunner, the CSO, including a Holocaust commemoration, meetings about Nazi war crimes and an Israeli film festival, on the hollow pretence that they presented a security risk.

Neville Nagler, then deputy president of the Board, had explained in a local newspaper that it was the job of the CSO to keep apart “people who have lost relatives in the Holocaust” and “people with a political view.”