The British government's attempt to ban Palestine Action is fronted by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary. As has been widely noted, she is a serial recipient of Zionist lobby largesse, being in receipt of over £300,000 from Zionist connected individuals and groups in the last three years alone. She admits to taking £210,000 from Gary Lubner, the South African Zionist whose family firm profited from the Apartheid regime there, and was involved in sanctions busting. She also received over £100,000 from Labour Together, a vehicle for arch Zionist influencer Trevor Chinn, who has extraordinary access to the Labour government.

But even though she and the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, are very firmly in the pocket of the Zionists, it still takes pressure from outside Parliament to get the government to enact the ever more extreme policies desired by the Zionists.

In this case, the credit for exerting that successful pressure has been claimed by a group called We Believe in Israel. This was led by the famously non-Jewish arms industry lobbyist and Luke Akehurst until he was parachuted into a safe Labour seat at the last UK election. The group was formed from the main Zionist regime propaganda group in the UK: BICOM, in which the aforementioned Trevor Chinn plays a leading role.

We Believe in Israel launched a campaign to proscribe Palestine Action in June 2025, and within a month was successful.

The Home Secretary rushed the order through Parliament, laying the draft order on Monday, June 30, and holding the votes on Wednesday, July 2, so that the order could come into effect the following Friday.

There was no reference to links to Hamas in Cooper’s statement, but she did mention Palestine Action as threatening infrastructure supporting Ukraine and NATO, echoing language in We Believe in Israel’s report.

The report stated: “In July 2022, [Palestine Action] was investigated under counter-terrorism protocols following intelligence suggesting contact between some of its members and individuals linked to Hamas-aligned networks abroad (see: Metropolitan Police briefing, classified).”

It is not clear how or why We Believe in Israel accessed classified documents.

On June 21, We Believe in Israel posted on X:

“Behind Palestine Action’s theatre of resistance stands a darker puppeteer: the [Iranian] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” The only evidence provided was that the IRGC vocabulary “echoes in Palestine Action’s slogans”.

https://t.co/8GtHv0k9sB

— We Believe in Israel (@WeBelieveIsrael) June 21, 2025

This was a transparent attempt to show that the obviously non-terrorist Palestine Action is connected to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which it is not. It’s also an attempt to encourage both the proscription of the IRGC in the UK, even though the IRGC is not organised in the UK. In reality, this would be a hostile escalation against British Shia Muslims who would be asserted to have IRGC connections via the usual campaigns of misinformation and deception.

Two days later, The Times published anonymous briefings from Home Office officials who claimed to be suspicious of the group’s funding by the Islamic Republic “via proxies… given that their objectives are aligned.” This suggests a wholesale alignment of at least sections of the national security apparatus with the Zionist regime.

But who was directing the campaign by We Believe in Israel? Meet alleged Israeli spy Catherine Perez Shakdam, the director of the lobby group.

Born into a secular French Jewish family, she married a Yemeni man and converted to Sunni Islam. After the marriage ended, she converted to Shia Islam and began a process she later referred to as “infiltration”, gaining jobs with independent media like MintPress and connections with RT and PressTV. She travelled to Iran and proceeded to infiltrate leading circles of the Islamic Republic and the IRGC.

She herself refers to her “decade-long undercover investigation” of the Islamic Republic. What was she doing there? 

She reportedly “operated in silence. … she took photographs, recorded conversations, and mapped out the hidden veins of Iran’s most sensitive state secrets, from nuclear facilities and scientific personnel to the covert movements of Revolutionary Guard commanders.” Key IRGC commanders were constantly moved for protection.

But every time "Israel" struck…as if guided by an insider…The Iranian leadership began to suspect…someone had sold them out. And that someone was Catherine.

Related News

Palestine Solidarity Campaign shills for the Zionists

Is the British independent reviewer of extremism a Zionist asset?

It is not clear what role her spying played in the recent attacks on the Islamic Republic by the Zionists, but some sources have claimed it was significant.

Shakdam came out as a spy in a blog post for the Times of Israel in November 2021.

Though presenting her spy mission as if it was unconnected to the Mossad, she concedes that, prior to her engagement with Iran, she worked for Wikistrat.

Founded in "Israel" in 2010 and technically a private company, its upper ranks are filled with former Israeli government intelligence officers. Chief amongst them is co-founder Elad Schaffer, whose LinkedIn page noted that he was head of an intelligence desk for an unnamed Israeli government agency. But the logo that is displayed next to the admission is that of Unit 8200 of the IDF Military Intelligence Division, which is the signals intelligence agency of the Zionist regime.

As Ken Klippenstein revealed back in 2016:

But despite the firm’s purported commitment to “transparent, open-source methodologies,” the documents provided to The Daily Beast show something different: that the company exploits “in country… informants” as sources. Wikistrat’s “About” page includes mention of “on-the-ground collection.”

And according to internal Wikistrat documents marked “highly confidential and sensitive material,” 74 percent of the firm’s revenue came from clients that were foreign governments.

Though Wikistrat’s website lists its location as Washington, Kadtke said the company was run out of "Israel" the entire time he worked there.

A former Wikistrat employee confirmed the company was run out of Tel Aviv, with the D.C. office only handling sales and business development, he said. “He knew a whole lot of people there [in Israel]. One of his connections was the former head of the [Israeli] intelligence directorate, Amos Yadlin.” In fact, each of Wikistrat’s principals listed Tel Aviv as their address in a 2015 copy of Wikistrat’s Virginia business license.

Co-founder of Wikistrat, Joel Zamel, reportedly met with Trump advisers in January 2017, including Steve Bannon. Leaked documents from those meetings “show that participants in the meetings discussed a multi-pronged strategy for eroding, and eventually ending, the current Iranian regime, including economic, information, and military tactics for weakening the Tehran government.”

Presumably, Shakdam was part of that operation. It has been widely reported, as Alan MacLeod notes, “that slain Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was also secretly working for Wikistrat just before his assassination”, an indication of the perhaps routine use of journalistic cover by Wikistrat.

When was Shakdam at Wikistrat? Public sources indicate she was working there in 2013. In 2014, she noted that she had been there for seven years, which seems not to match her later characterisation of her involvement there as “minimal”. Other sources say she worked at the “Israeli” office of the firm. In 2011, while connected to Wikistrat, she worked for a Saudi site close to the ruling monarchy. She says that the first time she was invited to Iran was in 2015 or 2016.

Next Century Foundation for Peace

Given her relations with anti-Iranian groups like Wikistrat and al Majalla, it seems that her cover was not very deep. This impression is reinforced by the fact - undisclosed until now - that during the period she was allegedly a hijab wearing supporter of the Axis of Resistance, she was also producing work for a British charity called the Next Century Foundation for Peace. This is a Zionist dialogue-type charity set up to encourage back channel discussions with the Palestinian resistance. Amongst its leading lights are key well embedded Zionist activists like Lord David Alliance, Felix Posen and Lord Andrew Stone.

She produced pieces for them from March 2019 onwards, in her Axis persona, giving an affiliation at the Baghdad based Al Bayan Centre for Planning & Studies. She changed her affiliation on the site when she joined the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society in June 2022.

The mysterious Forum for Foreign Relations

But it is not only We Believe in Israel behind the campaign to ban Palestine Action. Other groups were involved. We Believe in Israel specifically mentioned the Forum for Foreign Affairs.  Its “meticulous research and strategic analysis were instrumental,” they said.

What is the Forum? It appears to be a consultancy but is not registered as a company or charity, thus shrouding its operations in mystery. Its Executive Director is none other than the same Catherine Perez-Shakdam. Why is she wearing two hats?

A clue is in the involvement of the shadowy and secretive Zionist businessman David Abrahams. He famously passed over half a million in cash through intermediaries to the Labour Party in order to evade disclosure rules. He is listed as a “special advisor” on the Forum website

Abrahams has himself undertaken covert missions which have involved secret talks with the PLO and then later with Hamas.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam is a bloodthirsty genocidal Zionist and continues to work as an intelligence asset of the Zionist regime.