On February 2nd of this year, the Youth Front for Palestine (YFFP) called for a meeting in Manchester with the title: Youth Against Normalisation! Get Israeli Lies Out Of Schools!

The meeting was held to denounce the infiltration of Zionist front groups into UK schools. 

They asked “Why is an organisation which had at least three employees simultaneously working for the Israeli government, and at least 28 former IDF [IOF] personnel among its workforce, teaching about Palestine in British schools?” “Right under our noses”, they pointed to Groups like Solutions Not Sides (SNS) and Forum of Discussion of "Israel" and Palestine (FODIP) who they said were "seeking to undermine support for Palestinian rights by spreading lies such as the myth of an equal 'two-sided conflict' instead of the reality of Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians."

At the meeting a representative of the FODIP was present. Sadia Akram is a Muslim hijabi woman who might have felt she blended in. But the YFFP had spotted her. After the meeting, she tried to pretend that the FODIP was different from SNS. It was definitely not part of the same normalisation tendency. Was it not true, though, that she was listed on the website of SNS as an advisory board member? Her reply was that she had never attended a single SNS board meeting. But in reality, as the YFFP activists knew, she was listed on the SNS website as a member of its advisory board, for example in August 2022, and was still there. However, when she spoke to YFFP after the meeting on 2 February 2023,  by late evening on 3 February, her name had been removed. 

What was going on there?  It seems that the plan was to accept that Solutions Not Sides might have dubious connections to the Zionist entity (it does), but that FODIP was not tarred with the same brush. We can tell from this that the pressure is starting to have an effect. So what is FODIP? Is it an innocent group of people “sensitively” facilitating “inter-faith dialogue” and promoting “co-operation through dialogue”? A brief review of the facts tells a different story.

FODIP history

According to its “founder” Jane Clements, FODIP was created in 2008, but it was not registered with the Charity Commission or Companies House, the UK business registry, until 11 August 2010. Its objectives, agreed on in October that year, were to “promote racial and religious harmony” where “community relations are threatened by differences in perspectives regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict”. 

There were four initial directors, all of whom gave addresses in the Manchester area, including a Rabbi (Warren Elf) and a Protestant minister (Robert Day). The organisation has tried to maintain the idea that it is a Manchester organisation, but its origins are in London.  We can see this via the organisation that Jane Clements left in order to set up FODIP, which was the Council for Christians and Jews, based in Westminster in Tufton Street, a street stuffed with conservative think tanks and lobbyists. But then, she gave a different address on the incorporation documents at Companies House: Star House, 104-198 Grafton Street, London NW5 B4A. This gives a clue to one of the moving forces in the creation of the group.  The address is the registered office of the Faith and Belief Forum, an interfaith grouping (initially called the Three Faiths Forum) set up by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, the widely known philanthropist and Zionist activist who died in 2016. Other groups registered to that address from 2020 have, likewise, been Zionist organisations -  including the liberal Zionist Yachad and the New "Israel" Forum.

Sir Sigmund Sternberg and the Council of Christians and Jews

Sternberg was a pioneer of interfaith activities devoted to undermining opposition to the Zionist project in faith communities. This started with the Council of Christians and Jews, and Steinberg was in the 1980s both its Honorary Treasurer and Chairman of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), of which the CCJ was the UK member. 

According to the Revd Dr Marcus Braybrooke, the official historian of the CCJ, at that time, “both ICCJ and CCJ were beginning to invite Muslims to share in their programmes” and he and Sternberg “thought that in time both organisations would broaden their remit”. Sheik Zaki Badawi, Head of the Muslim College in Ealing and Sternberg said “we’re aware that a piece in the interfaith jigsaw was missing. There was a need for a place where members of the Abrahamic religions could meet. [Sternberg] rang me up and told me about this and I said it was a good idea. A few days later, I discovered that I was a Co-Founder”. As Braybrooke discloses “with the growing importance of the Muslim community, the festering wounds in "Israel"/Palestine and the growth of extremism, Muslim-Christian-Jewish dialogue has a special importance.” 

Three Faiths Forum

This led to the setting up of the Three Faiths Forum in 1997, the same year that Jane Clements joined the CCJ. As well as starting out at the same address as the Three Faiths Forum (later known as the Faith and Belief Forum) the two groups had personnel in common. The director of FODIP from July 2014-June 2016 was Josh Cass. According to his own account during all this time and beyond, he was also the “Development and fundraising manager” of the Faith and Belief Forum (from October 2009 to April 2022). Cass was said  by FODIP to have “strong links with the Jewish community” and to work “with New North London Synagogue to develop their social action programme.” The Synagogue is the lead and largest of the Masorti Judaism movement, which is formally signed up to the World Zionist Organisation and thus Zionist. It also happens to be based on the campus of the Sternberg Centre for Judaism founded by Sigmund Sternberg, the founder of the Three Faiths Forum and – we now infer - FODIP.

This connection between the CCJ and the Faith and Belief Forum would appear, therefore to be the founding nexus of FODIP: In short it is a Zionist project to undermine Palestinian claims and blunt criticism of the Zionist project. All the rest of the story follows from that.

FODIP and “transparency”

FODIP claims to believe in “transparency … especially in relation to funding”, but it is not a transparent organisation. It submitted accounts to companies House for the year ending August 2016 and then failed to submit accounts for the year to August 2017. It then applied to be struck off in November 2017 and was dissolved as a company in February 2018.  It submitted accounts to the Charity commission for the year ending 31 August 2018 and then failed to submit any accounts the following year. It did not submit accounts to the Charity Commission after those for the period up to the end of August 2018 and was removed from the Charity register on 31 January 2020. Finally, it re-registered as a CIO with the Charity Commission on 14 May 2020 and delivered accounts for the year to August 2021 in June 2022. So, in all, it has failed to deliver accounts for 2019 and 2020 or even to have any organisational form, despite this, it continued to exist in that period, and received grant money.

Zionist funding sources

Public documents show that FODIP has also received funds from a variety of charities with Zionist connections, for example the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which has also given to other Zionist foundations such as the Pears Foundation. The foundation gave FODIP £48,850 in 2013-15 for a “cross communal” project in Manchester.

The CCJ is funded by a variety of sources including a number of pro-"Israel" foundations:

·       The Pears Family Charitable Foundation - A Zionist family foundation, which has also donated to Islamophobic think tanks like Policy Exchange and Civitas, to normalising Solutions Not Sides, Forward Thinking, Mitzvah Day and the key "Israel"-government-initiated normalisation grouping as The Abraham Fund Initiatives. It has funded the United Jewish "Israel" Appeal (UJIA), the main fundraiser for the Apartheid state in the UK and also the extremist Chabad Lubavitch sect.

·       Gerald and Gail Ronson Family Foundation (Headed by Gerald Ronson, the CEO of the Zionist Community Security Trust).  Ronson’s foundation also donates to Islamophobic groups like the Policy Exchange think tank, a range of Zionist groups including the Interdisciplinary Center (the only private university in "Israel" which reserves 15% of places for students from elite military units from the IOF), the "Jerusalem" Foundation (which is active in ethnic cleansing in occupied East Jerusalem), the Jewish National Fund (the key agency involved in ethnically cleansing Palestinians by taking their land). He has been a leading supporter of the extremist Chabad-Lubavitch sect for decades.  According to the Zionist intelligence agency "Shin Bet", followers of the Chabad Rabbi - the so called “hilltop youth” - are responsible for most price tag revenge attacks on Palestinians.

·       Rubin Foundation Charitable Trust (headed by Stephen Rubin a longtime Zionist activist) which has also donated to neo-con think tank Civitas and the UJIA the largest Zionist fundraising group in the UK and a formal constituent of the Zionist movement.

·       Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust - which has also funded Islamophobic groups including Policy Exchange, Civitas, and Zionist groups such as the Anglo-"Israel" Association, Jewish Leadership Council, "Israel"-Diaspora Trust, United Jewish "Israel" Appeal, Community Security Trust, (which was complicit in the witch-hunt against the left in the UK in 2015-19), and the "Jerusalem" Foundation which is directly involved in ethnic cleansing in occupied East Jerusalem. 

Amongst Vice Presidents of the CCJ are Stephen Rubin (of the Rubin Foundation Charitable Trust) and Henry Grunwald (Formerly President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and a founder and first Chairman of the pro-"Israel" Jewish Leadership Council). Trustees include Rabbi David Mason (also an advisor to the normalising Solutions Not Sides) and Vivian Wineman (former President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews). Unsurprisingly, there are no advocates of Palestinian rights in this nexus. 

CCJ and FODIP

Several members of the CCJ work with or for FODIP. Patron Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield is a former head of the Zionist-movement-affiliated Movement for Reform Judaism and a President of the Council of Christians and Jews. Among the Patrons, Baron Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford, was Chair of the Council of Christians and Jews. In 2020 Rabbi David Mason was listed as a board member, and at the same time was a trustee at the CCJ and also an advisor with Solutions Not Sides, mentioned above. In 2019, Mason presented a panel event session on contemporary anti-Semitism in the UK at the International Council of Christians and Jews conference, in which he pushed the “new anti-Semitism” thesis developed by the Zionist regime: Mason “talked about left-wing anti-Zionist, anti-Semitism, with it being a challenge in some Church groups”. 

Others involved in FODIP include co-founder and co-chair Rabbi, Warren Elf, who was among 400 Jewish Leaders and scholars who in 2014 denounced “genocide” charges against "Israel" in relation to the attacks by occupation forces on Gaza.

Solutions not Sides and the normalisation lobby

FODIP also works closely with another normalising group, Solutions Not Sides. We have already seen that two FODIP-connected people (Rabbi David Mason and Sadia Akram) are, or have been, advisers to SNS. But in addition, they clearly collaborate closely. Much of the video produced by FODIP on their ‘Tough Options’ features footage from SNS workshops.

Indeed, FODIP has gone further in its normalisation activities, working with Roots, an organisation seeking to normalise settlers in Palestine. In December 2020, they hosted “Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, an Israeli Orthodox Jew and Settler, and Noor Awad, a Palestinian” to “share their personal stories with us”. They are said to be “fostering a grassroots movement of understanding, non-violence and transformation”. Perhaps this meeting encourages Roots, who subsequently created “Friends of Roots UK” group, and attempted to launch in the UK in late 2022.  Fortunately, the Youth Front For Palestine was ready for them, and they were run out of Manchester as their national tour and launch collapsed around them. A further connection between the two groups is that one of the four founders of FODIP, Steven Longden, is currently the chair of the Trustees of Friends of Roots UK.

We can conclude at this stage that FODIP was created on the initiative of Zionists active in “faith washing” the Zionist project as part of the bigger normalisation project. However, as we will see in part two of this article, the normalisation of Zionism also appears to be part of the agenda of the UK government in its 'counter-extremism' activities. Both Zionism and British 'counter-extremism' are obsessed about targeting the Muslim community to undermine criticism of UK foreign policy, as well as criticism of the Zionist project.