Matt Kennard: “Israel performs the role of an imperial satellite through which the US can dominate the Middle East”

Matt Kennard, British journalist and author. D.R.

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your article ‘Keir Starmer’s 100 spy flights over Gaza in support of Israel’, you talk about the UK spying for Israel. In your opinion, why do Westerners, including the UK, unconditionally support Israel?

Matt Kennard: There are two arguments for why you see such loyal support from the West for Israel. One is that Israel performs the role of an imperial satellite through which the US and its allies can dominate the Middle East and secure its resources. The other is that the Israel lobby has captured the political systems in Washington, London and elsewhere. 

Through my work, I have come down on the side of the lobby now. I believe that the lobby has developed its power to such an extent that it makes it impossible for a political leader to rise up in the US or UK with policies that might tame Israeli excesses and crimes. In the US, the obvious example is AIPAC which funds politicians directly, and in the UK, we have Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel, which also fund politicians directly. But there is a whole other ecosystem of lobbying that does not even have Israel as its signature issue, they cover that with issues like fighting antisemitism and supporting the Jewish community. Organisations like the Anti-Defamation League in the US and Jewish Labour Movement in the UK perform this role. 

But taken in aggregate these organisations have such a hold on the political system that it makes it impossible for our governments to go seriously against Israeli policy. 

In your opinion, aren’t both the United States and Great Britain guilty of war crimes by supporting Israel? Don’t you think that the British and American leaders should be brought to justice in the same way as Netanyahu and Gallant?

I believe that the US and Britain are not complicit in the Gaza genocide. They are participants. And every American and British minister who has overseen this policy of participation since October 2023 should be brought to justice, including the current President of the US Joe Biden and Prime Minister of Britain Keir Starmer.

They are not accessories to the crime. They are the criminals who have perpetrated the crime. This is not just restricted to arms provided, but goes to the deep intelligence cooperation between these countries and Israel for its Gaza war. It also goes to the secret role US and UK special forces have likely been playing in the ground operation in Gaza. The ICC and ICJ need to investigate and demand evidence from Washington and London about their covert war in Gaza. 

In your opinion, isn’t the war in Gaza an American and British war, or even a Western war, and not just an Israeli war?

Israel is a small country. Its population is about the same size as London. Its GDP is smaller than Sweden. It could not operate for more than a couple of weeks without US support. Israeli officials have also said Britain is providing intelligence it cannot collect by itself. So yes, this is a tripartite genocide in Gaza: US-UK-Israel. 

The US and UK like to pretend they are merely supporters of Israel, no participants, but the evidence shows they are a key cog in the Israeli war machine, and that they are involved in Israeli operations. They pretend this because they know they are participating in grave war crimes and crimes against humanity, for which its leaders should face justice at The Hague. 

What is the impact of the New York Times leak about Britain’s secret role in the Israeli assault on Gaza and what are the consequences for British officials directly involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

The New York Times leak showed that Britain sent a spy squad to Israel early on in the genocide. The Israeli official said that Britain is providing intelligence from spy flights that “Israel cannot collect on its own” and it gives them “value added”. This spy squad likely involves MI6 and SAS, two nearly completely secret parts of the British state. 

The UK is refusing to disclose which parts of the Israeli government it is giving the intelligence to or what it involves. The British even refused recently to disclose if it was passing information for the purposes of military targeting. So my hunch is that the UK are involved in the Gaza crimes much deeper than we yet understand and the extreme secrecy is because they have launched a cover-up. 

In your book “Racket”, you talk about the fact that the world is run by a caste of racketeers and white-collar thugs. You worked for the Financial Times for many years and you know the capitalist system from the inside. When the world is run by racketeers and thugs, can we still talk about democracy?

Democracy is an illusion that allows the NATO powers to project power externally and internally. We do have some limited freedoms with regard to free speech and protest compared to, say, a dictatorship. These are real but they are being eroded dramatically at this moment in time, much of it to repress the pro-Palestinian majority in the Western world. The ruling class are at war with their populations on the issue of Gaza. 

But in terms of the political system, the two-party system in US and UK, it is not democracy. We are merely permitted to vote for either of two factions of the same establishment pro-war pro-corporate party every 4 or 5 years. The two-party system is an outgrowth of oligarchy, which is why it is defended so rigorously by the establishment.
 

On top of this we have huge concentration of wealth in the corporate sector, and with wealth comes power. Our governments have been captured to a large extent by corporate and power and made to work in the interests of the private sector rather than the public. That process has accelerated massively in the last two decades. 

In your masterly book “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, a major investigation covering 30 countries”, you reveal the behaviour of multinationals. How do you explain the fact that multinationals have become out of control and above the law? Isn’t it dangerous to have corporations and multinationals running the world?

The corporate sector consciously sought to construct a new world government as decolonisation picked up after the Second World War so they could retain control of the resources of the world when they didn’t have formal empire to back them up. 

One of the major elements within this supranational corporate government is the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system which began with the World Bank in 1956. It allows multinationals to sue state for enacting policies they don’t like—at international venues. These tribunals sometimes award billions of dollars to multinationals from the public coffers. But even more important than that is that is has a policy chill effect whereby governments are scared to enact certain policies that are in the interests of their people for fear of getting hit with a suit by companies. This is having a chilling effect all over the world. 

There are other elements within this architecture of control, including the so-called aid industry, but ISDS is for me the best example of how it works. 

It is massively dangerous to have corporations running the world because corporations only have one concern: increasing their profits and extracting more resources. States should be a check on that, but most of the time work for the corporations against their own people. In a situation where climate change threatens the world in an unprecedented way, humanity cannot enact the policies we need to avert apocalypse, which would be to phase out fossil fuels completely. So corporate control is not only dangerous, it’s an existential question. Their hold must be broken for us to survive as a species. 

Your book “Irregular Army” is also a masterful work that tells us about the US military or how the US army has recruited neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members and criminals of all stripes. Isn’t an army made up of such individuals a danger to the United States, and indeed to the world?

During the War on Terror, the US could not recruit enough troops for its all-volunteer force. It changed regulations on all sorts of unsavoury individuals, including neo-Nazis and criminals and gang members. That was a disaster for the occupied populations of Iraq and Afghanistan and many atrocities committed by US military personnel can be linked clearly to this change of regulation. But it has also been and continues to be a disaster for the domestic US population. All these military-trained extremists are back in the US now after over a decade and more of war. They are not becoming priests. The consequences of what the Pentagon did during the War on Terror is now playing out in the US. The war has come home. 

What do you think of the American election that has just taken place and which concerns the whole world?

This US election have shown once again that the US is not a democracy. The only two candidates that had a chance of entering the White House are committed supporters of genocide. One of them has been participating in the criminal attack on Gaza for over a year. The other is even worse. I cannot see how anyone of conscious could vote for Kamala Harris after her role in the Gaza genocide – or vote for Donald Trump who is a nightmare for the world and the domestic US. There was a wonderful candidate who is anti-genocide and against corporate control of the US polity. Her name is Jill Stein and she was the Green Party candidate. If she had cost the Democrats the election, it might have changed things for the better in the long-term because the Democrats would have had to move towards her politically for survival. That was the only hope I saw in the US election. 

Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen

Who is Matt Kennard?

Matt Kennard is a British investigative journalist and author.

While still a student journalist, Kennard exposed one of his university’s lecturers as a white supremacist, sparking an international story, and leading to the lecturer’s early retirement. After receiving the Guardian’s top student journalism prize, Kennard went on to gain a masters at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York, where he was a Stabile investigative fellow.

After a short spell with Democracy Now! in New York, he spent three years working as a staff writer for the Financial Times in London, New York, and Washington DC, covering, amongst other things, the Pentagon, the White House, Wall Street, and the City of London. He has subsequently written for a number of newspapers including the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, Mother Jones, Foreign Policy, Chicago Tribune, Nation, Intercept, etc. He was for many years responsible for investigations on the investigative journalism website Declassified UK, which he co-founded and which he left on 28 October 2024.

He has reported from many countries: UK, US, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Somalia, Tanzania, South Africa, Malawi, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), India, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Turkey, China, Ukraine, Romania. His work has been translated into several languages including Arabic, Chinese and French.

He has written several books, including: Irregular Army, which investigates the recruitment practices of the US Army and reveals the enlistment of neo-Nazis, gang members and criminals to serve in the Middle East. The Racket exposes the hidden instruments used by the US government to exert economic and military control around the world. The book includes reports from 15 countries, from Israel-Palestine and Haiti to Mexico and South Africa. Silent Coup reveals how corporations overthrew democracy and has been translated into French as Le coup d’Etat silencieux.

Matt Kennard is a supporter of the abolition of the British monarchy and the closure of public schools.

His official website: https://mattkennard.tumblr.com/

Published in French in Algeriepatriotique and La Nouvelle République