 Do you remember the story about Jeremy Corbyn being a Czech spy? There was no evidence for the claim, yet it still dominated headlines for over a week. Well, now Kirsteama has hired someone who officially worked for the military intelligence agency of another country. And surprise surprise, the mainstream media have no interest in the story whatsoever. Now, according to reports in Electronic Interfada, which have not been denied by Labour spokespeople Asaf Kaplan, was recently hired by the Labour Party to work in the leader's office managing social media. He's described on the website of a former employer as a Unit 8200 veteran, which is an elite division of the Israeli military intelligence services. We'll go on in a moment to explain more about what that particular unit does. You can also see on Asaf Kaplan's LinkedIn, as revealed by journalist Asa Winstanley, he cites almost five years working with the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces. And that information has now been removed from LinkedIn, but it hasn't been. So I've said this hasn't been reported in the mainstream media. The argument, it seems that people on a different faction of the Labour Party from me are making is that this isn't news. This is why should anyone care? And this is just a previous job. Someone who's changed their jobs, they did work in military intelligence. Now they work in politics. So what? Now, from my perspective, I'm not particularly worried this is a security threat. I don't have any reason to believe that this person is working for Kier Stammer because they want to steal state secrets. I mean, I might even think maybe some of Britain's state secrets deserve to be stolen. That's not my worry here. My concern is more with what Unit 8200 routinely do to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and what it says about the leadership of the Labour Party that they have no problem hiring someone who worked in that role, for whom that is a key part of their CV. To tell you a bit about the Unit 8200, I'm going to go to a Guardian article from 2014. This article was based on sort of an account by someone who'd worked in that unit and then had left because they were outraged or disappointed by what they had been asked to do. They left the unit ultimately after being uncomfortable with what they were asked to do. So they write, as a soldier in Unit 8200, I collected information on people accused of either attacking Israelis, trying to attack Israelis, desiring to harm Israelis and considering attacking Israelis. I also collected information on people who were completely innocent and whose only crime was that they interested the Israeli security system for various reasons, for reasons they had absolutely no way of knowing. All Palestinians are exposed to nonstop monitoring without any legal protection. Junior soldiers can decide when someone is a target for the collection of information. There is no procedure in place to determine whether the violation of the individual's rights is necessarily justifiable. The notion of rights for Palestinians does not exist at all, not even as an idea to be disregarded. Any Palestinian may be targeted and may suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion or even direct physical injury. Such instances might occur if the individual is of any interest to the system for any reason. Any information that might enable extortion of an individual is considered relevant information, whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank. He is a target for blackmail. Now, that's an account of what working in the Unit 8200 is like. And now people who advocate for Palestinian rights in the Labour Party, for Palestinians in the Labour Party, I think it raises questions, it certainly raises questions that someone who has five years working for military intelligence, including that unit, now works in the leader's office. Now, I'm not saying that should necessarily rule anyone out, I'm saying this raises serious questions and not just questions about the person working there, but also questions about the judgment of the leadership and whose concerns they care about. Because obviously that's quite a provocative thing to do at a moment when many Palestinians and their advocates in the party feel like their opinions, their positions, their right to speak freely is being threatened. Now, I'm going to go to Aaron in one moment to talk about what he makes of this incident. Before I do that, though, I want to run through a few rebuttals from people who've basically been attacking me over the past 24 hours because I shared this article by Electronic Interfader. And they've taken lots of forms, lots of people, very annoyed that someone would think this was a story, but I'll go through some of the main arguments. So the first complaint I got after sharing that article with this piece of information is that military service is mandatory in Israel, so this isn't a choice of the individual, this is just he's an Israeli citizen and so has to do this against his will. Now, we could have a debate about conscientious objectives. I'm sure that's a very difficult decision and conversation to have, but it's actually irrelevant because it's mandatory to join the Israeli military for two years and eight months. And this person we know from his LinkedIn stayed on for an extra two years. They were there for five, four years and seven months, sorry. The other claim I've had is that whatever he did, it's irrelevant to the job he's doing. So what if someone worked in military intelligence, they're now doing a completely different job and we should forget about what was on someone's previous CV. I used to be a teaching assistant. Now I'm a host of a YouTube show. One doesn't have that much impact on the other. Now, I wouldn't, I don't think that's true in my case, but I also don't think it's true in this case. So the job was advertised as social listening and organizing manager, which is essentially a role of monitoring what people say online. Now, this isn't, it's not purely to spy on members. They've advertised it as say to attack disinformation online, but we know that there are many labor members who don't have much trust in the ability of the labor party to monitor what they're saying fairly. And so to get someone who was previously, whose skills, whose tricks of the trade have been learned in military intelligence seems to me, again, like it's not a decision that you would take if you were seriously respectful of the people within your party who advocate for the rights of Palestinians. Finally, one of the main sort of complaints I've heard about people saying this could be a problem is that this person, yes, they worked for Israeli military intelligence for four years and seven months, but actually their politics are leftist. They attended anti-Netanyahu demonstrations and also worked for the Israeli labor party. That was one of the jobs they had before joining the UK labor party. Now, this again is just so naive. It's the kind of thing that you hear not even British leftists or British center left, especially people who are sort of associated with progress and that sort of thing where they sort of suggest that anything in Israel that's anti-Netanyahu is automatically progressive and there can be no problem with. Now, that's just not true. So the oppression of the Palestinians did not start and end with Netanyahu. And in fact, the labor party which this person was working for from 2018 to 2019 didn't have particularly progressive views about Palestine. So its leader at the time was Avi Gabe. Now, who is Gabe? This is an article from 2017 by Ben White. I'm a scholar on Israel, Palestine. So he writes, yesterday, Gabe told Israeli television that he opposed discussing the removal of even the most isolated illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The remarks came a day after Gabe told a meeting of party activists that the Arabs have to be afraid of us. He added, they fire one missile, you fire 20. That's all they understand in the Middle East. On Saturday, meanwhile, Gabe vowed to never enter into a coalition with the joint list and Nesit group or Knessit group dominated by parties representing Palestinian citizens. So he said, I won't work with the Arab party, although it's notable that Gabe had already served before this in a Netanyahu cabinet. So you can see that this doesn't necessarily, ah, the Israeli labor party, they must be anti-occupation. They must be people who are passionate advocates for Palestinian rights. From those comments from its leader, who was leader at the time that this person worked for them, I don't really think that stacks up. Now, Aaron, I know you shared this article on Twitter as well, which has prompted a lot of wrath from various people. What do you make of this story? Do you think there is any legitimacy to the claim? Oh, we shouldn't care. This is a non-story. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's thoroughly ridiculous. Like you say, Michael, we can have a debate about the implications of it, whether or not you should work for Kirsten or what it says about the leader's office, et cetera. But the idea is not a story of public interest, really. Somebody who worked in the equivalent of, the Israeli NSA is what this unit is effectively. Somebody who worked in there voluntarily, really. You don't think that's a story of public interest? I have to disagree. If there was somebody that was working for GCHQ in Britain and then they went to work for a government elsewhere, a left wing, let's say, somebody from GCHQ went to work for a center-left party elsewhere, I would be very surprised if that wasn't a story of interest. And people say, oh, you're just targeting this guy because he's Israeli, that's racist. If the person had worked for the NSA or the CIA, I would have the exact same misgivings, which is that these are organizations involved in human rights breaches. These are organizations which I think have significantly compromised individuals' rights of privacy and liberty and freedom of expression and association. I have a problem with that. Now, labor's a democratic party with a bunch of different points of view, and that's fine. People are entitled not to have a problem with that. I get that. That's what a free society is about. But the idea that raising this and saying, I have an issue with this, is somehow beyond the pale, isn't just ridiculous and censorious. It's deeply, deeply anti-democratic. And the language it's couched in of anti-racism, I mean, it's astonishing really. It's shocking. Of course, this is a story of major profound interest. And I personally don't think you should be working for the labor party. I'm allowed to think that. People don't get jobs on the basis of nasty tweets from 10 years ago. I do think that somebody who's worked in that kind of an organization has to give an account of why they worked there, their views on the organization, what they did, whether they regret it or not. And that's a conversation worth having. At Navarra Media, I don't think we would hire somebody who had previously worked for GCHD or the NSA unless they said, I really regret the things I had to do because that isn't congruent with our values as an organization. Is this chap's values congruent with the labor party? He shouldn't be employed by the labor leader. It's really as simple as that. Now, I'm not trying to get the guy's head and get him kicked out. Keir Starmer thinks he's good enough. That's his call. But I have to finish with this, to iterate what I've just said. This is absolutely an issue of public interest. And the fact it's not been covered in the Guardian or other similar outlets on the center left or on the center, who really does tell you they aren't that interested in news. They exhibit the exact same biases you see with the right-wing press. They will not publish stories which they think could undermine or disparage the people that they politically support, in this case, Keir Starmer. And I mean, something I noticed as well on Twitter yesterday was just the hypocrisy of so many centrists talking about this. So one example, which I think summarizes it really well, I actually, I should have got the tweets up, but you can check them out. John McTernan, who used to be a Tony Blair advisor. So when, after I'd shared this article, he's sort of tweeting, ah, the Jeremy Corbyn cranks are really out today. And I tweeted, not quoting him, just tweeted separately. Can you imagine what would have been the reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had hired someone in his office who had worked in Russian intelligence? Can you imagine if that had happened? And then we as supporters of Jeremy Corbyn had all argued, oh, that's not a story. It's just a previous job he had. I mean, not only would that be headline news for a week, but also any of us who claimed this isn't a story, we'd be a joke. That would be the kind of screenshot they take of us and they share it for time and memorial to say, these are the journalists who were so brown nosing of Jeremy Corbyn that they pretended it wasn't an issue that in his office, he had someone who worked for the Russian secret service. But now it's exactly the same. People say, oh, well, Israel is an ally of Britain and Russia isn't. To be honest, I don't care. I care about whether or not a state is a human rights abuser, right? I don't care about whether or not it's allied to us and has diplomatic ties with us. Saudi Arabia is an ally of Great Britain and they are one of the worst human rights abusers in the world. I don't really see how people who have any sense of sort of moral right and wrong can say that that's the decider. Anyway, to go back to John McTernan, he's saying, oh, this is just cranks, cranking, cranking, whatever. And once I tweeted that comment about what would have happened if there had been a, someone who'd worked in Russian intelligence in Corbyn's office, he quote tweeted and that said Jeremy Corbyn was the asset, right? So on the one hand, you've got these centrists who are saying, oh, it's really cranky to suggest that someone who literally on his CV worked in the military intelligence of a human rights abusing power. It's really, you know, that's conspiratorial, that's nonsense, it's racist, right? But then with no evidence whatsoever, you know, there's a lot of evidence for this. It happened. There's no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn is a spy and that's what these centrists will feel that they can openly tweet on Twitter. It's ridiculous. I want to go to a different instance on Twitter. So that was stuff that annoyed me on social media. This was a tweet thread that I think really made sense of all of this and also showed sort of how ill-informed many of the people who were jumping to the defense of this person. And I mean, we don't know him personally. I suppose I mean jumping to the defense of his backstory of the different jobs and positions he's had. How actually out of step that is to how people with any knowledge of the situation think about this. So this is a tweet thread from Rob Abrams. He co-founded Namod, which is a group of British Jews trying to build opposition to Israel's occupation of Palestine. They're trying to build support within the British Jewish community against occupation. Now, I spoke to him earlier in DMs today and he has lots of experience working with anti-occupation activists in Israel's lived there for a couple of years and this is what he tweeted yesterday. So he tweeted, the only thing I have to say about the whole Asaf Kaplan thing is that anyone who spent time organizing with Israeli anti-occupation groups knows that being suspicious of someone with military intelligence on their CV is an uncontroversial stance on the Israeli left. I get the reason some people are uncomfortable and why the discourse generally here is so poor but seriously, some of you are taking positions that people in photos you love to share of demos in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would just find bizarre. Also, not all the people protesting Netanyahu are leftist. Being anti-Netanyahu isn't synonymous with being pro-Palestinian rights. I think that's a very well-informed assessment of what's going on. And I think what it really shines light on is that you've got all of these sort of onlookers in Britain who sort of say, oh, to even talk about, you demonize everyone in Israel, even the people who are anti-Netanyahu, even the people who are in the Labour Party and you demonize people just because they worked in military intelligence, whereas working in military intelligence is a completely normal thing to do. If it were military intelligence for another country, you wouldn't have a problem with it. It's just because it's Israel. What is your obsession here? And this point by someone who's lived in Israel, who's worked with leftists in Israel, was like, actually, no, this is... What these people have concerns about in terms of the leader of the opposition hiring somebody who worked for five years in military intelligence. They're exactly the same things that leftists in Israel have concerns about. So this idea that this is just an obsession with hating Israel is just deluded. It's a fantasy. And it is something people throw who have no understanding of the situation to try and silence people and to try and make them feel ashamed to talk about what's happening. And that's what's really interesting here. Asa Winstani, who wrote the original story, he did another tweet today. I haven't confirmed it, but it kind of rang true to me actually. He was saying there was a Guardian journalist who wanted to cover this, but the Labour Party, when he spoke to them, they didn't deny it happened. But what they did say is you shouldn't cover this. And if you want to cover this, that we'll talk to your editor and get it killed. And again, I can't confirm that. That's what Asa Winstani said on Twitter, the person who wrote this original story. But what that reflects is the attitude I've seen on Twitter to this, because no one wants to have an actual conversation about the facts of whether or not it is worrying to have someone who worked in military intelligence for a human rights abusing power for five years. They just want to say, you can't discuss this, sorry. We're not gonna have a conversation about the facts of the matter. We're not gonna talk about the concrete issues here. All we're going to say is that you shouldn't even be having this conversation. And that to me is not a healthy way of operating in politics. It's definitely not a good way of doing journalism. And I don't think that it does justice to the many Palestinian advocates, many Palestinians who are gonna find this incredibly concerning to just say, sorry, sorry, you might find this concerning. You can't talk about it. Aaron, I want to bring you back in. I supposed to talk about, yeah, the reaction to this, what's gonna happen next. I assume this is gonna be water of a duck's back for Kirsten and if there are, and Palestinians and Palestinian rights activists in the labor party who are upset about it, they can go hang. I mean, they might even be, maybe this is a bit of a trolling exercise. I've also seen that sort of suggested. Yeah, I think that's right. What does it say as well, Michael, about the potential of a labor government? And this is something which is really, this is really worrying for me as somebody who's, I voted labor in every general election, except when I voted for the Greens in 2015. But I remember the dark days of a very right-wing authoritarian labor party, which didn't just go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan that did extraordinary rendition and actually enabled the shift. We've seen right in this country for 25 years against human rights, against the rule of law. A lot of that wasn't enabled by the labor party. The labor party introduced the Human Rights Act, but it was also elements within the labor party which sort of demonized strangely the same document they themselves created. And I wonder, if you can't, as a sort of party leadership, if you can't defend your own choices openly, democratically, it's like, well, we've hired him. Here's why. If you've got a problem with that, sorry. We have a process whereby some people can and can't work for us and he has not in any way fallen short of those. Do that. I don't see the problem there. But like you say, it's the instant recourse to this can't be discussed. It's beyond the pale, we'll get it spiked or if we don't get it spiked you're never going to talk to us ever again. You certainly don't want to cover the labor party for your newspaper ever again. Deeply authoritarian. Again, you know, I have said we don't want those kinds of people running the country. We've had those people running the country for a really long time. It's terrible. It's only, it means we're going backwards all of the time in every respect. And I think this story combined with the donor story previous to Richard Leonard resigning last week. Richard Leonard said he was going to resign anyway. Maybe he was. But the point is the differences between the conservative party and the labor party about their ability to openly defend the things they really believe in their political positions and their relationship to big business aren't that different. It's just the Tories are in charge. The Tories are in government. And so when the labor party say all the Tories they won't go on GMB and talk about X, Y and Z. Well, you're not willing to discuss the hiring of somebody who's working in the leader's office regarding a story of clear public interest. And by the way, if it's not a particular, if it's not a politically vulnerable point for leadership why is this guy changed his LinkedIn profile? I mean, it is and that's why. So it is worrying. But also I think almost as bad Mike, like you say is that there's significant numbers of people on Twitter and Twitter is not the real world. But who are labor party members who think they're progressive who think they believe in liberal values who not only don't think this is a story fine you're allowed to do that but who think we should sense a discussion of it. You know, that's deeply, deeply troubling. And I think there's been a huge market in the sort of in the political space in this country for a little bit too long I think where you can talk about something where you have absolutely no knowledge. You don't know what you're talking about. You can't historically contextualize things like people's sort of explanations of the Israeli labor party which has ever seen some historically terrible things as has the British labor party. You know, so I think there's a huge market for basically the sort of these insidious, vacuous, ignorant takes, you know, oh, what's the, you know, oh, this is actually racism. I'm surprised it's not been commissioned by somebody and it's not in the Guardian. I think that's the most likely place this will be discussed in the Guardian is in common is free lambasting people like you and I. And I think that's, I mean, that's happening with a number of stories, by the way. And the Guardian haven't taken up a lot, a lot, a lot of stories which could just potentially embarrass the labor leadership. By the way, not even huge stories, just like minorly embarrassing. That's what's most worrying for me. And the Guardian, you know, they like to talk about fearless truth telling journalism. When it comes to Kirstama, you ain't that. And people can say, well, you were the same for Jeremy Corbyn. I just don't think that's true. You can look at our record of criticism of the labor party. I went on the BBC, you went on the BBC to talk about various issues which, you know, were in no way advantageous to the leadership. We had points of political disagreement, whether it was open selection, whether it was an elected general secretary, whether it was various bits of domestic or foreign policy. I think actually a lot of this is about projection and all the stuff that gets thrown into our media, you're not real journalists, you know, you're kind of your propagandists. I do absolutely think that applies to the people saying it applies to us. You know, I think particularly yourself, Michael, you know, I think you're exemplary in offering two sides of an argument and trying to be open as objective as possible. And while doing that, saying, here are my political commitments. That's what we all try to do in our media. I think it's brutally absent across so much of the British media landscape.