?Mayhew's outcasts? : Anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson's Labour Party

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of a vocal and influential pro-Palestinian campaign within the Labour Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, it focuses upon the work of the Labour Middle East Council established by Christopher Mayhew in 1969. The article argues that Mayhew succeeded in laying the foundations for a network of pro-Palestinian organizations in the 1980s but that the note of anti-Zionist radicalism which he introduced provided a foothold for more controversial forms of activism within the mainstream Labour movement.

Full text

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‘Mayhew’s Outcasts’
Anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson’s Labour Party
Dr James R Vaughan
Abstract
This article examines the emergence of a vocal and influential pro-Palestinian
campaign within the Labour Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, it focuses
upon the work of the Labour Middle East Council established by Christopher
Mayhew in 1969. The article argues that Mayhew succeeded in laying the
foundations for a network of pro-Palestinian organisations in the 1980s but that the
note of anti-Zionist radicalism which he introduced, provided a foothold for more
controversial forms of activism within the mainstream Labour movement.
Keywords
Israel; Palestine; anti-Zionism; British Politics; Labour Party; Labour Middle East
Council; CAABU; Trade Unions; Christopher Mayhew; Harold Wilson.
Author details
Dr James R Vaughan is a lecturer in International History in the Department of
International Politics at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Unconquerable
Minds: the Failure of American and British Propaganda in the Arab Middle East,
1945-1957 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and numerous articles on British
politics, diplomacy and the Middle East.
Institutional affiliation: Aberystwyth University
Full contact address: Dr James R Vaughan
Department of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University
Penglais
Aberystwyth
SY23 3FE
Article length (excluding Abstract, Keywords and Author details): 9,911

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‘Mayhew’s Outcasts’
Anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson’s
Labour Party
Dr James R Vaughan
This article focuses upon Christopher Mayhew’s campaign to generate support for the
Palestinian cause in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Before 1967, ‘Palestine’
was not a cause which attracted significant support within Labour circles and it was
only with the creation of the Labour Middle East Council (LMEC) in 1969 that
Mayhew established the first of what would become a network of organisations
linking the Labour and trade union movements to the wider Palestinian liberation
campaign. This achievement has been largely overlooked by historians who have
tended to focus upon the 1980s as the decade in which levels of pro-Palestinian
activism rose significantly. This article argues that the success of pro-Palestinian
organisations on the Left in the 1980s was founded upon the efforts of a dedicated
group of campaigners, led by Mayhew, in the preceding decade. The legacy of their
work lies not only in the creation of an organised voice in support of the Palestinians
on the contemporary British left, but also in the articulation of a new language of anti-
Zionism which, in some of its most influential aspects, does not always reflect greatly
to the credit of those who developed it.
Given Mayhew’s importance in the history of British anti-Zionism, it is striking that
comparatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of his political career. He
has been rightly credited, during his time as a junior Minister in Ernest Bevin’s
Foreign Office, with playing a central role in the establishment of Britain’s
controversial Cold War propaganda agency, the Information Research Department
(IRD).
1
Historians have also found Mayhew notable for his association with the right-
wing of the Labour Party (he was among those dismissed as ‘Hampstead poodles’ by
Richard Crossman in 1959) and his defection to the Liberal Party in 1974.
2
His role
as a leading British campaigner for the Palestinian cause, while sometimes
acknowledged, has yet to attract detailed analysis.
3
In recent accounts of the

3
European Left’s troubled relationship with Israel and Zionism, neither Colin Shindler
nor Robert Wistrich mention Mayhew although this is perhaps unsurprising given that
neither looks in detail at developments within the British Labour Party between 1948
and the 1980s.
4
Consequently, their books tend to support June Edmonds’ suggestion
that there is a tendency prevalent among historians of anti-Zionism to focus their
attention upon the hard left and the Communist Party rather than the centrist, social
democratic tradition to which Mayhew belonged.
5
Edmonds has written a valuable study of Labour Party policy towards Israel which
recognises Mayhew’s status as the Party’s ‘most notable advocate of the Arab cause’
in the 1960s and early 1970s.
6
Nevertheless, she regards him as a peripheral figure in
the longer-term history of pro-Palestinian activism and concludes that the kind of anti-
Zionism he represented remained ‘very marginal before the 1980s.’
7
Accordingly
Mayhew merits only brief mentions in her article on the post-1967 development of
Labour Party policy towards the Arab-Israel dispute.
8
Edmonds may be right in
describing Mayhew as one of only a tiny minority of anti-Zionist Labour MPs in the
1960s but her conclusion that ‘it was not until the early 1980s...that really significant
change took place’
9
both underestimates the achievements of anti-Israeli activists
during the 1970s and downplays the role that Mayhew, together with Parliamentary
allies such as Andrew Faulds and David Watkins, played in nurturing that activism.
Mayhew’s first political contacts with the Zionist movement came with his
appointment to the Foreign Office as Ernest Bevin’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary
of State in 1946. Mayhew accepted this job knowing little about international
relations and nothing whatsoever about the intricacies of the Palestine question.
10
Bevin’s opinions, however, were difficult to ignore and his attitudes towards Zionism
and the Jewish people have been the subject of intense debate. There have been
those, such as Ian Mikardo, who have claimed that Bevin’s Palestine policy was
distorted by the ‘fanatical hatred he developed for the Jews.’
11
Others have argued
that Bevin’s derogatory remarks about Zionists and Jews were more an exasperated
response to the intense pressures of dealing with the situation in Palestine than a sign
of racial prejudice. Alan Bullock has expressed this argument most succinctly,
observing that ‘prejudice was cumulative, on both sides, making it more difficult for

4
Bevin to form a cool judgement and to disengage from a problem which had defeated
and marred the reputation of every British Minister who touched it.’
12
Mayhew’s own statements on the matter were contradictory, to say the least. In an
interview with Al Hayat newspaper in 1990, he expressed the view that
[Bevin] wasn’t racially prejudiced, not at all…. He was emotionally outraged
by the tactics of Zionism – by their terrorism, by their deception, by the
monstrous pressure brought on the British government by the American
government as a result of the pressure of the American Jewish community.’
13
It is difficult to see how this judgment can sit comfortably with the appraisal that
Mayhew had committed to his diary in 1948. ‘I must make a note about Ernest’s anti-
semitism,’ he had written, ‘There is no doubt, to my mind that Ernest detests Jews.’
14
If Mayhew, wisely enough, wished to distance himself from Bevin’s more
intemperate outbursts, it was not long before he developed his own ‘pronounced
distaste for Zionist methods of pressure and propaganda.’
15
The death threat that he
received in 1946 from the Stern Gang undoubtedly coloured his judgement and he
would refer to the incident for the rest of his career. In 1980, for example, he wrote to
offer support to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, during a period of strained
Anglo-Israeli relations. ‘Although Begin and Shamir have spoken rudely about you,’
he observed, ‘they have not threatened to assassinate you as they did to Ernie Bevin
and me in the old days. Their manners are improving as the years go by and we
should be truly thankful.’
16
In the event, Mayhew’s work at the Foreign Office was
ended not by a Zionist assassin, but as the more prosaic consequence of the electors of
South Norfolk depriving him of his seat in the 1950 general election.
17
It was upon visiting Jordan in 1953 that Mayhew gained his first experience of the
bitterness that pervaded the Palestinian refugee camps.
18
In his memoirs he expressed
regret that he had not begun campaigning for the Palestinians upon his return to
Britain. In fact, it was only a decade later, following a 1963 trip to Israel that
Mayhew became actively committed to the Palestinian cause.
19
He found Prime
Minister, Levi Eshkol, to be ‘brash and aggressive’ and dismissed Foreign Minister,

5
Golda Meir, somewhat condescendingly, as ‘a disappointing woman rather superficial
in mind and temperament.’
20
Meir, he remarked, related to Palestinians solely as
‘drivers, gardeners and houseboys’ and possessed a ‘colonial settler’s attitude’ similar
to that of British settlers in East Africa.
21
Mayhew came to believe that his clashes
with Israeli leaders during the course of this visit explained Wilson’s decision to keep
him away from the Foreign Office after the 1964 General Election. ‘Of course the
Israelis complained to my party leader about my attitude on this visit in 1963,’ he
claimed, ‘and this had a considerably adverse effect.’
22
Philip Ziegler, in his 1993
biography of Wilson, lent support to this claim. ‘Mayhew, he wrote, ‘was convinced
that Wilson’s recollection of this fracas explained why he was not offered a job in the
Foreign Office when the Labour Government was formed in 1964. Probably he was
right.’
23
Mayhew may not have achieved his desired return to the Foreign Office, but he did
return to office as Minister for the Navy. Thereafter, official duties limited his
opportunities to campaign on Middle Eastern questions until, in a protest against
proposed naval cuts, he resigned from the government in February 1966. The
following year, he embarked on a tour of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and
Egypt at the invitation of the Arab League.
24
The timing was portentous. In June
1967 the third Arab-Israeli war burst onto the international stage and Mayhew was
transformed into a very public advocate for the Arab cause.
On Monday 5 June, the opening day of the ‘Six Day’ war, Mayhew appeared on the
BBC television programme, Panorama, along with the Liberal Party leader, Jeremy
Thorpe, and the Conservative MP, Duncan Sandys. Mayhew’s remarks were not
especially contentious. He declared himself, somewhat disingenuously, to be
‘completely torn’ on the Arab-Israeli conflict, stating that he felt ‘desperately sad for
both sides.’ Insofar as he engaged in any pro-Arab advocacy it was simply to state
that ‘I think there is an Arab case as well as an Israeli case’ and to claim that ‘the
Israelis are the aggressors’ since Israel had initiated hostilities on 5 June (although he
accepted that the Arab states were responsible for provoking the crisis in May).
25
These remarks incurred a hostile response from within the Labour Party. On 7 June, a
group of MPs associated with the Labour Friends of Israel group wrote to the Chief
Whip complaining that Panorama had given the false impression that ‘Mayhew’s

6
views represented the position of the Parliamentary Labour Party.’
26
In his diary,
Crossman noted that the Cabinet had discussed ‘the prejudice displayed by the BBC
broadcasts’ and remarked that ‘Party members had been infuriated that the sole
Labour representative...was that fanatical pro-Arab, Christopher Mayhew.’
27
In the
same period, Mayhew clashed with the Party’s Jewish MPs (in one BBC interview he
called them ‘the Israeli army below the gangway’
28
) and Manny Shinwell, during a
particularly stormy confrontation, advised him in no uncertain terms to ‘go back to
Nasser.’
29
The inspiration for the creation of the Labour Middle East Council (LMEC) came
from the successful establishment, in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, of
the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), a cross-
party organisation for the promotion of Arab and, particularly, Palestinian interests.
The Conservative and Labour MPs, Ian Gilmour and Colin Jackson, served as the first
joint-Chairmen while Mayhew was involved from the outset as a Vice-Chairman.
Other prominent CAABU founders included the former Conservative Minister, Sir
Anthony Nutting, John Reddaway (whose brother, Norman, Mayhew knew well from
their time together in the Special Operations Executive and the Information Research
Department), and the journalist, Michael Adams, who directed the organisation’s
media and publicity work.
Mayhew later acknowledged that CAABU had been instrumental in encouraging him
to set up LMEC in 1969
30
and, from the outset, he saw LMEC as a mechanism for
bringing about a decisive change in the Labour movement’s approach to the Arab-
Israel conflict.
31
In an appeal to Mohamed Heykal, the editor of Egypt’s Al Ahram
newspaper and a close ally of President Nasser, Mayhew defined LMEC’s purpose as
being to build up ‘an effective resistance to the powerful Zionist propaganda and
pressure,’ which, he claimed, had ‘so far dominated the Labour movement.’
32
LMEC
quickly recruited nearly 30 Labour MPs to its ranks and among its early sponsors
could be found CAABU regulars like Fenner Brockway, Colin Jackson, David
Watkins, Elizabeth Collard and Andrew Faulds, as well as high-profile Labour Party
figures such as Woodrow Wyatt and Michael Foot. A successful Greater London
Regional Conference was organised in April 1969 and LMEC made its debut at the
Labour Party Conference later that year. Plans to establish regular speakers’ panels, a

7
newsletter and an information service were rapidly put in train
33
and, by 1972, the
membership of LMEC had grown to 160.
34
LMEC’s activities can be divided into three major types. Firstly, the organisation
worked to influence individuals and groups within the Labour Party and the trade
union movement. This involved the distribution of publicity material as well as more
costly enterprises such as organising visits to the Middle East for groups and
individuals. Secondly, LMEC, sometimes under the auspices of CAABU, sometimes
independently, sought make direct approaches to government officials and to
influence public opinion through the media. Thirdly, as LMEC’s influence grew, its
members began to cooperate with more radical British organisations and links were
established with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
During the 1970s, three attempts to establish a formal association with the Labour
Party were rejected by the National Executive Committee although this did at least
provide ammunition for publicity about the ‘Zionist pressures’ that LMEC members
believed to be dominating the Labour movement. Mayhew wrote to all Constituency
Parties criticising the Labour Party for continuing to accept Poale Zion as an affiliated
group while refusing to recognise ‘a body pledged to a more balanced approach and to
the support of United Nations’ resolutions.’
35
Failure to gain acceptance as a formally
affiliated Labour Party organisation did not hamper LMEC’s lobbying activity. In
June 1972, an LMEC policy statement entitled ‘British Policy on the Middle East’
was distributed to the Foreign Secretary, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, the
International Committee of the Labour Party and all Labour MPs. This statement
attributed the failure to achieve a peace settlement to ‘Israeli intransigence and
American bias’ and proposed a British policy based on dissociation from US
leadership in the region, a strong commitment to UN Security Council Resolution 242
and a warning to Israel that Britain would not tolerate settlements in the occupied
territories.
36
A draft resolution based on these principles was despatched to all
Constituency Labour Parties with an invitation for them to consider submitting it to
the annual Party Conference.
37
In April 1973, LMEC produced a major memorandum, drafted by Mayhew, for the
International Committee of the National Executive Committee (NEC). Entitled ‘The

8
Labour Party and the Middle East,’ it called for ‘a radical reappraisal’ of policy and ‘a
revision of the Party’s traditional support for Israel and Zionism.’ In a revealing
paragraph which hinted at Britain’s vulnerability to the Arab ‘oil weapon’, it was
noted that ‘In contrast with Tories, who have shown some limited understanding of
Arab aspirations, the Party is distrusted in the Arab world and should take decisive
steps to improve its standing there.’
38
Toughening the line taken in the June 1972
statement, LMEC now voiced support for UN General Assembly Resolution 2949 (far
stronger in its criticism of Israel than Security Council Resolution 242) and called for
the Party to accept a ‘substantial British contingent in any security force created under
UN auspices to aid the implementation of ...UN resolutions.’ The paper shied away
from advocating recognition of the PLO, opting instead for the more ambiguous
proposal that Labour should cultivate ‘contacts with the Arabs as well as Israelis –
and especially with the Palestinians whose plight remains at the centre of the Middle
East unrest.’
39
It is certainly arguable that LMEC’s efforts influenced the NEC.
Upon the outbreak of the October 1973 war, the NEC issued a statement which, whilst
expressing sympathy and understanding with ‘Israel’s single-minded determination to
preserve her security,’ also levelled some unusually sharp criticisms. ‘A total reliance
on military strength can only lead to the kind of grimly militaristic and rigid social
organisation which disfigures so many other countries already,’ it declared, adding
that ‘a concern with Security cannot justify the retention of territories occupied during
the conflicts with her Arab neighbours, nor their integration into Israel’s economic
structure.’
40
Away from the Labour Party’s policymaking bureaucracy, the trade unions emerged
as another battleground in LMEC’s bid to transform the attitudes of the Labour
movement. Mayhew and his allies could have been forgiven for regarding this arena
as an unpromising one since, in the 1960s, Trades Union Congress (TUC) leaders
were regarded as strongly pro-Israel. In 1967, Israel’s trade union organisation, the
Histadrut, invited TUC representatives to Israel and the TUC despatched its General
Secretary, Frank Cousins, and Fred Hayday, chairman of its international committee
as part of a ‘deliberate high-level attempt to mediate in the Middle East conflict.’
41
That such lofty ambitions produced so few results is no great surprise, but the episode
illustrates how the TUC’s attitude towards the Arab-Israeli conflict was likely to clash
with those of Mayhew’s fledgling LMEC. Britain’s Ambassador in Tel Aviv,

9
Michael Hadow, concluded that ‘the Israelis must be well satisfied with having
arranged this visit and with its results’
42
and his Labour Attaché, O.J. Skinner, added
that Hayday and Cousins had left him ‘in no doubt of their sympathy and support for
Israel.’
43
Back in London, comments by the TUC officials prompted the Foreign
Office’s Sir John Moberly to describe the duo as ‘well and truly brainwashed.’
44
Nevertheless, LMEC did establish a foothold in the trade union movement. It helped
that the Foreign Office was also seeking to push the TUC towards a greater
understanding of Arab viewpoints. In 1967, Hadow expressed concern that the Arab
case was ‘largely going by default in important Trade Union circles’
45
and Eastern
Department’s Anthony Moore pressed for closer links between the TUC and trade
unions in the Arab world on the grounds that these would ‘counter the strong
influence of the Histadrut with General Council members which tends to lead the
TUC to take a rather one-sided view of Arab/Israel affairs.’
46
There is evidence,
however, that the TUC’s pro-Israel position was not as solid as some believed and in
January 1968 George Foggon, the Foreign Office’s overseas labour adviser, reported
a conversation with Frank Cousins in which the latter had expressed ‘disappointment’
with Israel and concern about elements of Israeli policy. ‘They have not been too
happy about a number of aspects of Israel’s policy since the “six day war”,’ noted
Foggon, particularly ‘since they saw the refugee problem in Jordan and had an
opportunity to talk with some of those still crossing from the west bank.’
47
In April 1969, Mayhew invited the TUC to send representatives to LMEC’s first
major conference. The TUC declined, citing the short notice given, but it did express
a willingness to receive any LMEC documents produced in support of the event.
48
Progress, perhaps predictably, was slow. By May 1973, LMEC’s Executive
Committee noted that ‘much more effort must be made to interest the trade union
movement in [our] aims.’ A more persistent lobbying campaign then began, with
prominent trade union leaders invited to attend LMEC events and dinners, while
Elizabeth Collard was charged with the task of sending relevant press and publicity
materials to the various trade union journals.
49
Activities were stepped up again in
1975 when Roger Ward joined LMEC’s Executive Committee, establishing a
specialist trade union section. Ward sponsored trade union delegation visits to Egypt,
Iraq and Syria in December 1975 and Algeria in February 1976. Both he and the new

10
LMEC Chairman, David Watkins were delighted with the results observing that the
‘FCO seemed a bit amazed by it all’ when LMEC pulled off the coup of arranging
visits to Egypt by high-level delegations from the Association of Scientific, Technical
and Managerial Staffs (ASTMS) and the General and Municipal Workers Union
(GMWU) in September 1976. ‘Our work in this field is becoming quite widely
recognised,’ Ward told Watkins, drawing attention to an invitation he had received to
a dinner hosted by the Egyptian Ambassador and attended by Jack Jones, the General
Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and a delegation from
Egyptian Transport Workers’ Union.
50
Sending trade union delegations to the Middle
East was expensive and Ward acknowledged in November 1977 that his trade union
activities were using up a large proportion of the Council’s funds. A meeting of
LMEC’s Executive Committee, however, agreed that ‘the expenditure was
worthwhile.’
51
This pioneering work laid the foundations for the establishment, in
June 1980, of the Trade Union Friends of Palestine, an organisation soon noted for the
flamboyant anti-Zionist rhetoric of its ambitious General Secretary, George
Galloway.
52
Indeed, the transformation of trade union attitudes prompted the
establishment, in 1983, of a Trade Union Friends of Israel organisation and the
appointment, for the first time in fifteen years, of a full-time Histadrut representative
to the UK. Arriving in Britain, the Israeli official described the situation as ‘chilling’
and noted that the views of some unions were expressed with ‘verbal violence of a
kind he had not heard in years.’ ‘Literature published by the...Trade Union Friends of
Palestine,’ he reported, ‘is to be seen everywhere at trade union conferences and
meetings.’
53
In its media campaigns, LMEC was generally content to allow CAABU, with its
greater resources and higher public profile, to play the more active role. Since so
many LMEC members also subscribed to CAABU, it was convenient for the latter to
facilitate their media appearances and sponsor their publications. When the
entrepreneurial publisher, Claud Morris, decided to launch a magazine intended to
provide a forum for pro-Arab opinion, it was to CAABU personnel like Mayhew,
Adams, Reddaway and Nutting that he turned.
54
The result was Middle East
International, the first edition of which appeared in April 1971 and to which LMEC
figures like Mayhew made frequent contributions. Meanwhile, LMEC members
worked tirelessly writing letters to newspaper editors, producing opinion columns in

11
the press and appearing as guest experts on television and radio programmes. The
BBC was regarded as a particularly important target and, at a November 1973
meeting of CAABU’s General Committee, tactics for ‘attacking’ the Corporation
were considered in some detail. As the meeting considered how ‘young and ignorant’
BBC producers ‘fell victim to ‘Zionist propaganda,’ Mayhew argued that it was
important to direct pressure at top-level journalists and controllers.’
55
One result of
this meeting was that the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Elkins, who
CAABU denounced as ‘a dedicated and extreme kind of Zionist,’
56
would find
himself on the receiving end of organised CAABU attacks for the rest of the decade.
57
If, in public, CAABU and LMEC personnel sometimes found it politically expedient
to exaggerate the extent of ‘Zionist influence’ upon the British media, they were
privately satisfied with the results of their own media work. In the aftermath of the
1973 war, CAABU formally thanked its members for the letters that had been written
to newspaper, radio and television editors and noted that ‘their number has been so
great that it has not always been easy to acknowledge the copies sent to the office.’
The result, CAABU believed, was that ‘press (including radio and television)
coverage of the recent fighting...has been noticeably fairer than in 1967.’
58
‘Directly
and indirectly,’ Mayhew would later write, ‘CAABU...had a profound impact on
British perceptions of the Palestine problem.’
59
An early sign that LMEC and CAABU were developing contacts with more radical
pro-Palestinian groups can be seen in their members’ association with the Free
Palestine newspaper in the 1970s. Free Palestine had begun life as a ‘violent and
crudely written’
60
newsletter in 1968 and indirect links to CAABU were established
when Claud Morris agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969. That business
relationship proved to be short-lived but the newspaper continued to cultivate links
with British MPs and activists. Its editor, Louis Eaks, brought his own connections to
the Young Liberal ‘Red Guard’ faction, and Free Palestine received political support
and journalistic contributions from LMEC regulars like Mayhew, Watkins and Faulds.
Morris later claimed not to have been aware of Free Palestine’s links to Arafat and
the PLO when he agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969.
61
Those connections,
however, are not especially difficult to uncover. A February 1975 editorial stated that

12
Free Palestine’s line was ‘determined by the political and strategy decisions of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation and Al Fatah’ whilst asserting that ‘this newspaper
is not funded by either of these organisations.’
62
In 1981, inviting Andrew Faulds to
join the editorial committee, Eaks claimed that Free Palestine was ‘independent of
any specific Palestinian organisation’ although he noted that the newspaper was
‘committed to the Fatah/PLO line.’
63
A closer look at the newspaper’s parent
company, Petra Publishing, however, reveals that among the firm’s directors was
Khaled al-Hassan (Abu Said), a founding member of Fatah and one of Arafat’s closest
advisers. Another director was Saleh Khalili, who was also a member of Free
Palestine’s editorial committee. Khalili has been identified by Alex Mitchell as a
London-based agent of Abu Jihad, head of the PLO’s military operations.
64
According
to Mitchell, Khalili’s job as the PLO’s ‘man-at-large in London’ brought him into
collaborative liaison with Gerry Healey’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP),
whose publications were subsidised by Libya’s Colonel Gadhaffi, and, through the
WRP, to the Lambeth Council leader, Ted Knight, who sat alongside Ken Livingstone
on the editorial board of the Labour Herald newspaper. Mitchell has even claimed
that Knight met with Arafat, Abu Jihad and Khalili in Tunis and succeeded in
soliciting a £15,000 donation to the Labour Herald from the PLO.
65
Whatever the
truth of that, it is certainly clear that much of the Labour Herald’s content was, in its
anti-Zionism, scarcely distinguishable from that of Free Palestine.
Free Palestine was also connected to the Palestine Action group, founded by Ghada
Karmi in June 1972. It was Eaks who first informed Andrew Faulds of plans to
establish ‘an anti-Apartheid type of organisation’ to lobby on behalf of the
Palestinians ‘within the Labour, Communist and Liberal parties’ in April 1972,
66
and
the new group’s political platform included support for:
1. The restitution of all the rights of the Palestinians, especially the right to
return to their homes.
2. The creation of a unitary, secular, democratic Palestine in which all citizens
have equal rights irrespective of race or creed.
3. The struggle of the Palestinians for the liberation of their homeland.
67

13
LMEC considered the desirability of cooperation with Palestine Action at a meeting
of its Executive Committee in October. Evidently, there were doubts about the
wisdom of a formal association and, noting that ‘an approach had been made to
LMEC to support the newly formed Palestine Action group’, it was ruled that ‘no
official support should be given to this movement.’
68
However, whilst LMEC
resolved to keep its distance from Palestine Action, there were no such restrictions
upon individual members. Indeed, Andrew Faulds, a member of LMEC’s Executive
Committee since January 1973,
69
became far more than a passive supporter of
Palestine Action. In December 1973, Karmi wrote to Faulds to confirm that ‘you
have been elected President of Palestine Action at our AGM’; an honorary position
that Faulds happily accepted.
70
Faulds played a key role in a major breakthrough for Palestine Action at the BBC. It
came in the form of a television programme, ‘The Right to Return’, broadcast on 26
November 1976 as part of BBC 2’s ‘Open Door’ series. Faulds presented the
programme, overseeing guest appearances from David Watkins and the anti-apartheid
campaigner and Young Liberal chairman, Peter Hain. A few days after the broadcast,
Karmi reported that no less a PLO luminary than Abu Lutof (Farouk Kaddoumi) had
praised the programme as ‘the best film he had ever seen on the Palestine issue’
71
and
CAABU’s John Reddaway also congratulated Faulds for making ‘a notable
contribution towards the exposition and defence of Palestinian rights.’
72
Unsurprisingly, the programme provoked a deeply hostile response from British
Jewish organisations and the Israeli press, with one newspaper reporting that ‘last
weekend, the most extremist anti-Israeli programme ever shown on Western
television was screened by the BBC.’
73
In its March 1977 newsletter, Palestine Action
described the film as ‘a striking success’ and stated that ‘we have been overwhelmed
with letters of support, donations, requests to join Palestine Action, and enquiries for
further information about the Palestinians and their cause.’
74
Faulds even received
congratulations note from a Scottish National Party activist who informed him that
‘The political, economic and cultural suppression of the Palestinian Arab has its direct
historical parallel in the land of Scotland since the Union.’
75
This proved a step too
far for Faulds. ‘I would not...wish to go along with your comparison of Palestine and
Scotland,’ he replied, ‘As a Labour Member of Parliament, I do not think you would
expect me to agree with the SNP.’
76

14
In their press and publicity work, Mayhew, his allies in CAABU and LMEC, and their
associates in groups like Palestine Action, developed a campaigning language of anti-
Zionism which proved to be both hugely influential and highly controversial.
Certainly, the presence of racial themes in the arguments being propounded made for
highly combustible political material and there are interesting echoes of Enoch
Powell’s racial rhetoric in some of the material associated with leading LMEC figures
like Mayhew and Faulds. Mayhew was certainly prepared to exploit domestic
political controversies on race and immigration as a springboard for attacks on Israel
and Zionism. Appearing on the BBC’s ‘The World Today’ programme in 1968, he
stated that
I never felt it was right to ask us to impose on the Arab world hundreds of
thousands of Jewish immigrants. And if I may say so, if it’s not irrelevant, the
controversy about immigration in Britain today, when we are asked to have in
Britain a comparatively negligible number of immigrants and yet we visited
on the Arab world with force of arms, comparatively millions of people of
different religion, different custom, different race.
77
Intriguingly, Richard Crossman had anticipated this kind of argument twenty years
earlier. English anti-Zionism, he suggested, was based on a deep fear of invasion.
‘The Englishman thinks of Zionism as something synthetic and unnatural,’ he wrote,
adding that Zionism appeared as ‘the product of high powered American
propaganda.’
78
As Shindler has noted, such formulations led many Englishmen to
look at Palestine and see ‘the Arab as defending his 1,000-year old civilization against
the invader.’
79
Another racial theme popularised by Mayhew (and one which Shlomo
Sands’ writings have done much to revive in recent years) was the idea that the
Jewish connection to the land of Israel was erroneous. In a 1970 speech to the
Institute of Race Relations, Mayhew wondered aloud whether the ‘true descendants’
of the Jews who were dispersed from Palestine two thousand years ago were in fact
the Palestinian Arabs. ‘I would like the Institute to consider the proposition,’ he
concluded, ‘that Mrs. Golda Meir is most unlikely to have ancestors who once lived in
Palestine, and far less likely to have such ancestors than Yasser Arafat.’
80

15
Mayhew also did much to develop the South African apartheid analogy in connection
with the Israel-Palestinian conflict. An early example of this came in 1969, when
Mayhew was lobbying against the possibility of Harold Wilson and Denis Healey
authorising the sale of Chieftain tanks to Israel. ‘I simply can’t believe,’ he wrote in a
letter to his old IRD comrade, Norman Reddaway, that ‘the British Government
would be so stupid as to provide the Israelis with weapons to use in the conquered
Arab territories – perhaps even, Sharpeville-style – against Arab civilians there.’
81
In
a June 1971 article for the Fabian journal, Venture, he argued that, ‘for a growing
minority of Labour people, support for Israel and Zionism is as difficult as support for
South Africa and apartheid and for very similar reasons.’ Should not the Labour
Party, he asked, ‘criticise Zionism with the same force and conviction as it denounces
apartheid?’
82
The cry of ‘Israeli apartheid’ soon became a staple feature of British
anti-Zionism. Writing in Free Palestine under the headline ‘Palestine must win’,
Peter Hain likened Harold Wilson’s views on Israel to ‘statements rationalising and
condoning racialism by right-wingers returning from South Africa.’ The radicalism
of Hain’s position at this time can be gauged from his rejection of UN Security
Council Resolution 242 and his assertion that ‘the case for the replacement of Israel
by a democratic, secular state of Palestine must be put uncompromisingly.’
83
Mayhew struck a slightly more moderate tone in his communications with Foreign
Secretary, Jim Callaghan, questioning whether any ‘catalogue of morally offensive
regimes’ to which the Labour Government should be opposed (among which he
named Greece, Portugal, Chile and South Africa) should not include ‘that which Israel
has established in the Arab territories occupied since 1967.’
84
The tactic of equating Zionism with Nazism was another distasteful feature of the
emerging language of anti-Zionist activism. Such imagery was not itself new (it can
be found in British press condemnation of groups like the Irgun and the Stern Gang in
Palestine after World War II
85
) but there was something more calculated about the use
of Nazi imagery as a means of delegitimising Zionism in the 1970s. Mayhew
certainly flirted with the analogy, writing in 1971 that ‘Germans who massacre Jews
are tried and executed. Jews who massacre Arabs are elected to political leadership’
86
and he greeted Menachem Begin’s 1977 election victory with the observation that ‘It
must be hard for Arabs to understand a country in which Germans who have

16
massacred Jews are tried as war criminals while Jews who have massacred Arabs are
elected Prime Minister.’
87
Free Palestine pioneered visual representations of the Zionism-Nazism analogy. The
front page of its April 1975 issue was adorned with the image of a Palestinian
prisoner reaching out from a prison cell window, the bars of which formed the shape
of a swastika.
88
Ken Livingstone’s Labour Herald newspaper adopted the ‘Zionism
equals Nazism’ trope with equal enthusiasm in the 1980s; perhaps the most notorious
example being the 1982 cartoon which, under the caption ‘The Final Solution’,
depicted Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin in SS uniform, standing atop a
mound of bloodied corpses, making a Nazi salute.
89
A dangerous feature of such
imagery was that it brought Palestinian activists into contact with views and
individuals more usually associated with the far right. In 1989, Faulds received a
letter from David Irving warning him ‘not to accept any wartime atrocity stories at
face value’ and informing him that ‘even the notorious “gas chambers” are now
turning out to have a been a fiction.’
90
There is no evidence to suggest that Faulds
replied to this letter, let alone agreed with its content, but it is telling that he saw
nothing to object to in another overtly anti-Semitic letter from a constituent who
remarked that ‘it is readily forgotten that Jewish financiers created the German
monster’ and that ‘Judaism (Zionism) is as racially exclusive as the “master race”
“chosen people” and just as ruthless against the Palestinian people.’
91
Replying to
this letter, Faulds saw fit only to thank his correspondent for ‘your support for my
anti-Zionist position’ and to remark that it was ‘extraordinary how the Zionist
propagandists manage to con public and international opinion.’
92
The notion that British Jews possessed ‘dual’ or ‘divided’ national loyalties, a theme
with a long and problematic history, was also revived by Mayhew and (to his political
cost) Faulds in the 1967-1973 period. Mayhew clashed with the Chief Rabbi,
Immanuel Jakobovits after publishing an article in which he had criticised Jakobovits
for addressing British Jews ‘almost as if he and they were Israeli nationals’ and
warning that ‘any suggestion that a particular section of the British people has rights
and duties in respect of a foreign government which the rest of the people do not have
is dangerous.’
93
In a sharp response, Jakobovits castigated Mayhew for ‘sowing the
seeds of strife and bitterness’ and explained that

17
The profound concern of Jews the world over for the survival of Israel and its
2½ million Jews had nothing whatever to do with dual loyalties.... Jews
offered their services and their fortunes to Israel not out of any loyalty to its
Government, but solely out of the human obligation to stand by brothers, in
their hour of need; that while, as British Jews, Britain was our country to
which we owed and paid our exclusive political loyalties, Israel was our
people to whose rescue we would come in the same way as you would be
expected to save any brother of yours when in danger, whatever his nationality
might be.
94
Faulds’ pronouncements on the ‘divided loyalties’ of British Jews would lead to his
removal from the Shadow Cabinet in November 1973. He had already incurred
Wilson’s displeasure after a 1972 Parliamentary debate in which he remarked that ‘it
is time some of our colleagues...forgot their dual loyalty to another country and
another Parliament. They are representatives here and not in the Knesset.’
95
Despite
a public rebuke from Wilson, Faulds returned to this theme in October 1973,
informing MPs that the ‘Zionist propaganda machine’ was ‘a fifth column in every
country of the world with a Jewish community,’ and stating that ‘that is why I talk of
dual loyalties.’
96
Wilson promptly sacked Faulds on the grounds that such language
‘impugned the patriotism of Jewish Members of Parliament’ and constituted
‘uncomradely behaviour.’
97
LMEC, in contrast, released a statement claiming that
‘many party colleagues will sympathise with Andrew Faulds’ and noting that
‘Zionism...calls on Jewish people everywhere for acts of loyalty towards Israel.
When the interests of Israel conflict with the interests of the nation to which these
Jewish people belong, this inevitably creates divided loyalties.’
98
Accusations against
British Jews on the grounds of ‘divided loyalties’ recurred at regular intervals
thereafter, most recently in comments made by the Labour MP for Newport West,
Paul Flynn, who in 2011 questioned whether a ‘Zionist’ could serve as British
Ambassador to Israel with the same effectiveness as ‘someone with roots in the UK
[who] can't be accused of having Jewish loyalty.’
99

18
A final theme which characterised much of the new rhetoric was an emphasis on the
conspiratorial nature of Zionism and its supporters. ‘The Jews,’ Mayhew had written
in an ill-judged moment in 1967, ‘are about the world’s best propagandists and
pushers’
100
and, addressing a UN forum in 1983, he complained that the US Congress
had ‘been bought by a foreign government.’
101
He even believed that his publishing
fortunes had been undermined by ‘Jewish pressure,’ complaining that sales of his
1987 autobiography suffered because ‘so many Jewish supporters of Israel are literary
editors, reviewers, members of library committees and so on.’
102
Faulds, too, was
quick to see conspiratorial hands at work, reportedly complaining to Tam Dalyell that
the ‘Jewish Labour establishment’ had ‘cost him a peerage.’
103
David Watkins’
writings on the history of ‘Zionist infiltration’ of the Labour Party have also been
criticised by subsequent scholars as little more than ‘a crude conspiracy theory.’
104
The conclusion that this kind of rhetoric blurred the contested distinctions between
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism seems inescapable. Yet, when Mayhew was moved
to consider the question of anti-Semitism as a serious issue, he did so in such a way as
to find Zionists guilty of causing the anti-Semitism of which they complained. In
1978, he warned that ‘the world’s growing hostility to Zionism will foster hostility to
the Jewish people.... Zionism is an encouragement to anti-semitism.’
105
The
contemporary resonance of this kind of thinking can be seen in the film-maker Ken
Loach’s 2009 assertion that ‘nothing has been a greater instigator of antisemitism than
the self-proclaimed Jewish state itself.’
106
Shlomo Avineri’s reminder that ‘Jews do
not “cause” antisemitism – the antisemites do’ would seem to be a pertinent comment
at this point.
107
The Legacy of Mayhew’s ‘Outcasts’
A brief survey of the political fortunes of the Labour Party’s most prominent pro-
Arab activists in the Wilson era might lead one to the conclusion that they enjoyed
limited success, to say the least. Margaret McKay, a prominent campaigner for
Palestinian refugees in the late 1960s did not survive long enough as an MP to be able
to play a major role in LMEC. Frequent trips to the Middle East earned her a
reputation in her Clapham constituency as ‘the woman on the Abu Dhabi omnibus’
and she was deselected by her constituency party before the 1970 General Election,
whereupon she promptly retired to live in the United Arab Emirates.
108
Andrew

19
Faulds’ sacking in 1973 did not end his front-bench career (he served as Labour’s arts
spokesman under Michael Foot between 1979 and 1982) but his outspoken nature
earned him a range of enemies stretching from Jewish MPs like Greville Janner to the
left-wing firebrand, Dennis Skinner.
109
A lack of unity within LMEC circles did not
help, and Faulds’ obvious antipathy towards David Watkins, who he described in
characteristically colourful language as ‘a dreadful prick,’ led him to boycott CAABU
during the period in which Watkins directed the organisation in the 1980s.
110
The title
of Watkins’ own political memoir, Seventeen Years in Obscurity, hardly suggests that
the CAABU Director’s parliamentary career had been particularly auspicious.
Mayhew, meanwhile, distrusted by the leadership and scorned as a closet Tory by the
left,
111
grew increasingly disaffected. There were whispers of rebellion, though these
were hardly taken very seriously and, upon hearing rumours that Mayhew might
challenge for the Labour leadership, Wilson reportedly noted that ‘if he does stand, it
will be the first time in history that an Arab has been crucified.’
112
In July 1974,
thoroughly disillusioned, Mayhew defected to the Liberals, establishing the Liberal
Middle East Council, a group that would attract the support of future party leader,
David Steel.
113
Yet, if individual careers stalled, the pro-Palestinian movement within the Labour
movement continued to flourish. In his memoirs, Mayhew noted that by the time of
his defection to the Liberals, ‘the Labour Middle East Council was making good
progress in detaching the party from its unbalanced support for Zionism’
114
and, in a
1992 booklet celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of CAABU’s establishment, he
gave credit to LMEC for having ‘challenged and in due course defeated the Zionists’
dominance.’
115
If the growth in pro-Palestinian activism in the 1980s was boosted by
the hostile international reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it is also
clear that plans for extending the network of Palestinian solidarity groups were in
place well before that time. Ghada Karmi, perhaps mindful of LMEC’s original
reluctance to associate itself with Palestine Action, approached Faulds as early as
May 1974 about the possibility of creating a Labour Friends of Palestine group.
116
The British Anti-Zionist Organisation (BAZO), dedicated to countering what it called
‘the Zionist stranglehold on the British media and public opinion’ and espousing a
brand of revolutionary anti-imperialism characterised by statements such as ‘only
reactionary apartheid and imperialist powers still support the expansionist Zionist

20
state of Israel’ was founded in Glasgow in October 1975,
117
establishing itself as a
controversial presence on British campuses.
118
Upon the outbreak of the 1982
Lebanon war, Ernie Ross, MP for Dundee West and the driving force (along with
George Galloway) behind the twinning of Dundee with the West Bank city of
Nablus,
119
established an anti-Israeli coalition, the Emergency Committee Against
Invasion of Lebanon (ECAIL). ECAIL, which held its inaugural meeting in the
House of Commons on 24 July 1982, counted among its sponsors not only CAABU
and the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Middle East Councils, but also the Trade
Union Friends of Palestine, the Communist Party of Great Britain, a host of other
union and student groups as well as regional and local ‘Friends of Palestine’
associations.
120
Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council, meanwhile, lent support
to a newly-formed ‘Labour Committee on Palestine’ which, at its founding conference
in November 1982, condemned ‘the racist and expansionist policies of the state of
Israel and its role as an agent of imperialism.’
121
A ‘Labour Friends of Palestine’
group was finally established within the Party in February 1986,
122
initially under the
stewardship of Harry Cohen and Joan Maynard, whose inflexible adherence to
socialist principles earned her the sobriquet ‘Stalin’s Grandmother.’
123
One of the ironies of the creation of this pro-Palestinian network was that Mayhew, a
dedicated anti-Communist and a politician of a determinedly centrist ideological
persuasion, should have laid the foundations for a cluster of organisations which, in
the 1980s, provided a stronghold within the Labour movement for groups and
individuals associated with a resurgent ‘hard’ left. Mayhew was aware of this danger
as early as 1968 and expressed concerns about the International Conference in
Support of the Arab People to be held in Cairo in January 1969; a gathering which
had attracted the interest of CAABU. At a meeting with the Foreign Office’s G.G.
Arthur, Mayhew asked, somewhat mischievously, whether it was the kind of
conference ‘which he had spent his time subverting when he was responsible for
IRD.’ Arthur replied that it was, whereupon Mayhew noted that ‘if it was in any way
communist-inspired, he would not go.’
124
By the early 1980s, now a life peer in the House of Lords, Mayhew found himself
facing this kind of problem on a regular basis. Even CAABU seemed vulnerable to
infiltration from the left and Mayhew warned in 1981 that ‘we are faced with a

21
“Bennite” threat.... It is essential that we safeguard the Council’s integrity.’
125
When
Ross invited Mayhew to address an ECAIL rally at Hyde Park, Mayhew refused on
the grounds that he was not prepared to share a platform with the General Secretary of
the Communist Party. ‘If the PLO’s cause is to flourish in Britain,’ he warned, ‘it
really must keep its distance from these extremely unpopular and unrepresentative
organisations.’
126
This warning should have resonated with Ross, who had already
been forced to move for the expulsion of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign group
from ECAIL after reports that its members had associated themselves with pro-IRA
chants at a rally in West Belfast. ‘It is quite clear,’ Ross told Faulds in August 1982,
‘that unless we take immediate, firm action with Palestine Solidarity Campaign, their
continuing membership of the Committee will not only bring the Committee into
disrepute, but...may well lead to individual organisations being forced to withdraw
from the Committee itself.’
127
Mayhew, an outcast from the Labour Party, was now in danger of a self-imposed exile
from the anti-Zionist network he had done so much to create. Labour’s new
generation of activists built upon Mayhew’s organisational structures and adopted his
language of anti-Zionism but many did so in the name of a left-wing radicalism that
he utterly rejected. It is true that there remained a number of dedicated Conservative
Party adherents to the Palestinian cause, Ian Gilmour, Dennis Walters and Tony
Marlow prominent among them, and we can certainly detect Mayhew’s influence in
the pronouncements of Liberal Democrat politicians like Jenny Tonge and, more
clumsily, David Ward. It was on the left, however, that the pro-Palestinian
movement really gained ground. As David Cesarani has pointed out, while right wing
anti-Zionism declined into ‘a species of pro-Arab sentimentalism’, it was ‘the mass-
based left [which] adopted anti-Zionism as a “poster issue”.’
128
Mayhew’s dilemma
was encapsulated by Colin Shindler, who observed that in the London of the 1980s,
‘Liberals and centrists who favoured an amelioration of Palestinian sufferings and an
outcome based on a two-state solution found themselves rubbing shoulders with
Trotskyists and Stalinists who wanted nothing of the sort.’
129
Christopher Mayhew was a politician who presented himself as someone who could
‘speak about the problem of left-wing take-overs of democratic organisations with
longer practical experience than anyone else in the United Kingdom.’
130
Yet the

22
element of anti-Zionist radicalism that he introduced to British politics had its greatest
appeal to groups and individuals within the Labour movement who Mayhew would
have regarded as his political enemies. Mayhew succeeded in transforming the way
in which the Labour Party engaged with the Israel-Palestinian question but, in so
doing, he unwittingly helped to create, within mainstream Labour politics, a coalition
between anti-Zionism and the far-left which he would have regarded as neither
desirable in itself, nor an effective strategy for the advancement of the Palestinian
cause.
1
See, for example, Black, John, Organising the British Propaganda Instrument: the British Experience
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 67-8; Lashmar, Paul & Oliver, James, Britain’s Secret
Propaganda War (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 24-7; Wilford, Hugh, ‘The Information
Research Department: Britain’s Secret Cold War Weapon Revealed’, Review of International Studies,
Vol. 24, No. 3 (1998), pp. 355-6. See also Mayhew’s own memoir, Mayhew, Christopher, A War of
Words: a Cold War Witness (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
2
Pugh, Martin, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (London: The Bodley Head,
2010), p.313; p. 363.
3
The major exception is to be found in Mayhew’s own writings, especially his autobiography, Time to
Explain (London: Hutchinson Ltd, 1987) and his controversial attack on ‘Zionist’ influence in the
British media, co-authored with Michael Adams, Publish it not... The Middle East Cover-Up (London:
Longman Group Ltd, 1975). Both, in different ways, are revealing, but neither can be regarded as an
especially objective examination of Mayhew’s engagement with the Arab-Israeli question.
4
Shindler, Colin, Israel and the European Left. Between Solidarity and Delegitimization (New York:
Continuum, 2012); Wistrich, Robert, From Ambivalence to Betrayal. The Left, the Jews, and Israel
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). In his treatment of the British Labour Party, Wistrich
leaps from 1948 to the 1980s with little regard for the intervening period (although, interestingly, he
does mention the campus activities of the Young Liberals in the 1970s). Shindler is more sensitive to
developments between 1948 and 1982 and considers the post-war influence of anti-colonial activists
like Fenner Brockway as well as the process by which individuals like Michael Foot, Eric Heffer and
Tony Benn became alienated from Israel. Shindler also notes the establishment of the Labour Middle
East Council in 1969 but without looking at the organisation’s activities in any great detail.
5
Edmonds, June, ‘The Evolution of British Labour Party Policy on Israel from 1967 to the Intifada’,
Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000), p. 24.
6
Edmonds, The Left and Israel. Party-Policy Change and Internal Democracy (Houndmills:
Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), p. 77.
7
Ibid., p. 98.
8
Edmonds, ‘The Evolution of British Labour Party Policy on Israel’, p. 28; p. 30.
9
Ibid., p. 30.
10
Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 115.
11
Mikardo, Ian, Back-Bencher (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 98.
12
Bullock, Alan, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1983), pp.
182-3.
13
Liddell Hart Centre, King’s College London [henceforward LHC], Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Khazen,
5 April 1990.
14
Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 119.
15
Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 116.
16
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Carrington, 15 July 1980.
17
Mayhew made a swift return to the Commons in 1951, appropriately for the constituency of
Woolwich East after a by-election caused by the death of Ernest Bevin.
18
Mayhew, Time to Explain, pp. 157-8.
19
Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 158.
20
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Notes on Middle East tour – July 1963.

23
21
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Khazen, 5 April 1990
22
Ibid.
23
Ziegler, Philip, Wilson: the Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1993), pp. 340-341.
24
The National Archives, Kew [henceforward TNA], FCO 17/24, Arbuthnott minute, 6 March 1967.
25
LHC, Mayhew 9/4, Transcript of Panorama, recorded from transmission, 5 June 1967.
26
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Rowlands et al to Silkin, 7 June 1967.
27
Crossman, Richard, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Vol. 2, Lord President of the Council and
Leader of the House of Commons 1966-68 (London: Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1976), p.
370.
28
LHC, Mayhew 9/4, BBC transcript, ‘The World at One’, 19 June 1967.
29
Hansard Parliamentary Debates: Commons, Vol. 747, c.1075, 7 June 1967.
30
British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics [henceforward
BLPES], Faulds 3/2/2/7, Mayhew, ‘Redressing the Balance’, The Council for the Advancement of
Arab-British Understanding: The First 25 Years 1967-1992 (CAABU, 1992).
31
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, Constitution and Rules of the Labour Middle East Council, 18 December 1969.
32
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Mayhew to Heykal, 10 June 1969.
33
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, Warburton to LMEC members, 14 October 1969.
34
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, minutes of a meeting of the LMEC Executive Committee, 16 July 1972.
35
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, Mayhew to all Constituency Labour Parties, August 1970. Poale Zion, the
English version of numerous Socialist-Zionist parties established in Europe and the USA in the first
decade of the 20th century, had been formally affiliated with the Labour Party since 1920.
36
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, Mayhew and Griffiths to Members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, 2 June
1972.
37
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, minutes of the LMEC Annual Meeting, 6 December 1972.
38
Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester [henceforward LHASC], International
Department Uncatalogued Material, Box 71, Folder: LPID Middle East 1973 Yom Kippur War, LMEC
memorandum for the International Committee of the NEC, ‘The Labour Party and the Middle East’, 18
April 1973.
39
LHASC, International Department Uncatalogued Material, Box 71, Folder: LPID Middle East 1973
Yom Kippur War, LMEC memorandum for the International Committee of the NEC, ‘The Labour
Party and the Middle East’, 18 April 1973.
40
LHASC, International Department Uncatalogued Material, Box 71, Folder: LPID Middle East 1973
Yom Kippur War, NEC Middle East Statement, October 1973.
41
Goodman, Geoffrey, The Awkward Warrior. Frank Cousins: His Life and Times (London: Davis-
Poynter, 1979), pp. 536-537.
42
TNA, FCO 17/614, Hadow to Brown, 24 August 1967.
43
TNA, FCO 17/614, Report by O.J. Skinner, ‘Visit of TUC Delegation to Israel,’ 22 August 1967.
44
TNA, FCO 17/614, Moberly minute, 29 August 1967.
45
TNA, FCO 17/614, Hadow to Brown, 24 August 1967.
46
TNA, FCO 17/42, Moore minute, 1 December 1967.
47
TNA, FCO 17/20, Foggon minute, 5 January 1968.
48
Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS.292B/956/3/2, TUC International Department
to Birkett, 9 April 1969.
49
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, minutes of a meeting of the LMEC Executive Committee, 22 May 1973.
50
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/15, Roger Ward to Watkins, 31 August 1976.
51
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/15, minutes of a meeting of the LMEC Executive Committee, 8 November 1977.
52
LHASC, CP/CENT/INT/16/5(iii), Trade Union Friends of Palestine Special Report, ‘Genocide in
Lebanon,’ August 1982.
53
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/53, Note by Ernie Ross to members of the Emergency Committee Against the
Invasion of Lebanon, 21 July 1983.
54
Morris, Claud, The Last Inch. A Middle East Odyssey (London: Kegan Paul International, 1996), pp.
9-13.
55
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/11, minutes of meeting of the General Committee of CAABU, 21 November
1973.
56
Ibid.
57
See, for example, TNA, FCO 93/1267, Adams and Reddaway to Merlyn Rees, 3 June 1977,
enclosing the CAABU memorandum, ‘Our Own Correspondent in Jerusalem’.
58
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/14, CAABU Notice to Members, undated (October-November 1973).

24
59
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/2/7, Mayhew, ‘Redressing the Balance’, The Council for the Advancement of
Arab-British Understanding: The First 25 Years 1967-1992 (CAABU, 1992).
60
Morris, The Last Inch, p. 8.
61
Ibid., p. 6.
62
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/12, Free Palestine, Vol. 8, No. 1 and 2, February 1975.
63
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/45, Eaks to Faulds, 11 April 1981.
64
Alex Mitchell, Come the Revolution. A Memoir (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2011), pp. 337-8.
65
Ibid., pp. 393-95.
66
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/10, Eaks to Faulds, 28 April 1972.
67
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/20, Palestine Action leaflet, undated.
68
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, minutes of a meeting of the LMEC Executive Committee, 5 October 1972.
69
LHC, Mayhew 9/7, minutes of a meeting of the LMEC Executive Committee, 24 January 1973.
70
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/10, Karmi to Faulds, 13 December 1973.
71
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/30, Karmi to Faulds, 29 November 1976.
72
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/30, Reddaway to Faulds, 30 November 1976.
73
BLPES, Faulds, 3/2/30, Yediot Aharonot, 28 November 1976.
74
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/20, Palestine Action newsletter, March 1977.
75
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/30, Hugh Miller (SNP) to Faulds, 30 November 1976.
76
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/30, Faulds to Miller, 31 January 1977.
77
LHC, Mayhew 9/4, Transcript of ‘The World Today,’ 1 May 1968.
78
Crossman, Palestine Mission. A Personal Record (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), p. 34.
79
Shindler, Israel and the European Left, p. 128.
80
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, text of speech to the Institute of Race Relations by Christopher Mayhew,
undated [c 1970].
81
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Mayhew to Reddaway, 19 February 1969.
82
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, Mayhew, ‘Israel, Arabs and the Labour Party’, Venture, June 1971.
83
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/12, Free Palestine, Vol. 6, No.4, April 1973.
84
TNA, FCO 93/546, Mayhew to Callaghan, 23 April 1974.
85
The Observer, for example, in an editorial comment upon the terrorist attack on the King David
Hotel in 1946, expressed the view that Zionism had degenerated into ‘gangster terror and a monstrous
regiment of indoctrinated youth.’ These Zionists, it argued, ‘are Hitler’s most tragic victims: they have
inherited his love of death’ (St Antony’s College, Oxford, Middle East Centre Archive, GB165-0068,
Richard Crossman Papers, Crossman/1, Shaw to Crossman, 2 August 1946, enclosing a press cutting,
The Observer, 28 July 1946).
86
LHC, Mayhew 9/2, Mayhew to the Editor, The Times, 16 April 1971.
87
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, Booklet, ‘CAABU’s Tenth Anniversary’, July 1977.
88
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/12, Free Palestine, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 1975.
89
LHASC, Labour Herald, 25 June 1982, Despite the outrage caused by this cartoon the Labour
Herald continued to play with Nazi imagery, the 1 April 1983 edition running a feature about ‘Israel’s
Concentration Camps’.
90
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/67, Irving to Faulds, 8 December 1989.
91
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/67, Corbett to Faulds, undated .
92
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/67, Faulds to Corbett, 20 February 1987. For a persuasive exposition of the anti-
Semitic dimensions of ‘Zionism equals Nazism’ imagery, see Julius, Anthony, Trials of the Diaspora.
A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 505-516 and
Freedland, Jonathan, ‘Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?’ in Iganski & Kosmin (eds.), A New
Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st Century Britain (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2003),
pp.121-122.
93
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, Mayhew, ‘Whose Promised Land?’ Envoy (November 1967).
94
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Jakobovits to Mayhew, 8 December 1967.
95
BLPES, Faulds 2/2/12, Free Palestine, Vol. 6, No. 2, February 1973.
96
Hansard Parliamentary Debates: Commons, Vol. 861, 18 October 1973, c. 498.
97
BLPES, Faulds 1/25, Wilson to Faulds, 10 December 1973.
98
Mayhew and Adams, Publish it not..., p. 56.
99
‘Jewish envoy not loyal to UK, says Labour MP’, Jewish Chronicle, 1 December 2011. Flynn later
offered a full apology for his remarks.
100
LHC, Mayhew 9/1, Mayhew to Norman Reddaway, 3 August 1967.
101
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, Mayhew speech to the UN International Conference on the Question of
Palestine, 3 September 1983.

25
102
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Khazen, 5 April 1990.
103
Jewish Chronicle, 9 June 2000.
104
Edmonds, The Left and Israel, pp. 83-84.
105
LHC, Mayhew 9/5/1, Mayhew, ‘The Defeat of Zionist Mythology’ (1978).
106
‘Ken Loach accuses Israel of ‘great crimes’,’ Jewish Chronicle, 20 March 2009.
107
Avineri, Shlomo, ‘Western Anti-Zionism: The Middle Ground’ in Wistrich (ed.) Anti-Zionism and
Antisemitism in the Contemporary World (New York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 172.
108
Dalyell, Tam, ‘Obituary: Margaret McKay,’ The Independent, Wednesday, 6 March 1996.
109
Jewish Chronicle, 13 February 1976.
110
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/2/7, Faulds to Townsend, 12 November 1996.
111
In 1968 Tony Benn described Mayhew as ‘very reactionary. There is really no difference between
him and a Tory.’(Benn, Office Without Power. Diaries 1968-1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), p.87).
112
‘Mayhew move could embarrass Thorpe,’ Jewish Chronicle, 22 July 1974.
113
Mayhew, Time to Explain, p. 208.
114
Ibid., p.199.
115
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/2/7, Mayhew, ‘Redressing the Balance’, The Council for the Advancement of
Arab-British Understanding: The First 25 Years 1967-1992 (CAABU, 1992).
116
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/10, Karmi to Faulds, 6 May 1974.
117
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/12, Free Palestine, Vol. 9, No.2, February 1976.
118
See Rubinstein, William, Israel, the Jews and the West. The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism (London:
The Social Affairs Unit, 2008), pp. 50-52; also Rubinstein, The Left, the Right and the Jews (New
York: Universe Books), pp. 160-163.
119
‘Nablus “twin” plan protest,’ Jewish Chronicle, 5 December 1980.
120
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/51, Minutes of the Inaugural meeting of the Emergency Committee Against the
Invasion of the Lebanon, 24 June 1982.
121
LHASC, Labour Herald, 26 November 1982.
122
BLPES, Faulds 3/2/49, Labour Friends of Palestine flyer, May 1986.
123
Dalyell, ‘Obituary: Joan Maynard’, The Independent, 30 March 1998.
124
TNA, FCO 17/707, Arthur minute, 19 December 1968.
125
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Reddaway, 30 December 1981.
126
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Ross, 14 September 1983.
127
BLPES, Faulds, 3/2/51, Ross to Faulds, 16 August 1982.
128
Cesarani, David, ‘Anti-Zionism in Britain, 1922-2002: Continuities and Discontinuities,’ in Herf,
Jeffrey (ed.), Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective. Convergence and Divergence
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 129.
129
Shindler, Israel and the European Left, pp. 243-244.
130
LHC, Mayhew 9/3, Mayhew to Reddaway, 30 December 1981.