Analysis

New ‘Lab’ MP Egan married to former 8200 Unit Israeli ‘spy’ recruiter

Right-wing MP’s partner spoke of his ‘great experience’ on pro-Israel propaganda programme, to which he recruited former spies from unit that marks its headsets for every Palestinian it kills

New right-wing Labour MP Damien Egan is married to a former IDF soldier who recruited former members of the IDF’s ‘Unit 8200’ spy unit to the ‘Excel’ propaganda programme run by the ultra-Zionist ‘Birthright Israel’ group (BI).

In a 2017 Facebook post, BI boasted of Felberbaum’s ‘important role’ in recruiting ex-8200 supervisors for ‘Excel’ interns, which Felberbaum said was ‘a great experience for me’, before talking of the ‘technological world I come from’. The article does not say that Felberbaum was a Unit 8200 member during his service, although his role recruiting former members raises the question:

Unit 8200 is the IDF’s ‘cyber-spy’ unit. Whistleblowers from the unit have revealed that members sometimes wear ‘X’s on their headsets to mark assassinations their information has facilitated – and that it targeted Palestinians for extortion and blackmail to further the government’s aims.

‘Excel’ is BI’s vehicle for taking US Jews on trips to Israel to reinforce their commitment to the occupying regime. In 2006, BI’s director of marketing said that:

[Israel] should be an integral part of every Jew’s identity

and criticised left-wing Jews who used the programme’s funding to go to help in Palestine, whom he said were weeded out if their ‘hidden agenda’ identified before going:

It is taking advantage of the Jewish money that sends people to Israel, exploiting this money to promote an agenda which is not the agenda of the people who funded Taglit

Felberbaum is not the only connection between Unit 8200 and Keir Starmer’s Labour. Starmer employs former member Assaf Kaplan as his ‘Social Listening and Organising Manager’, believed to be involved in monitoring members’ and others’ ‘online conversations’ about the party – and potentially finding information that can be used to expel anyone at odds with the regime. Kaplan removed mentions of the unit from his online profiles. He was also a ‘Facebook friend’ of disgraced Israeli embassy employee Shai Masot, who was sent home from the UK after being exposed organising campaigns against MPs Israel considered troublesome.

Egan himself is a member of the right-wing so-called ‘Jewish Labour Movement’. Unit 8200 has reportedly targeted gay Palestinians for blackmail and coercion.

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