The Civil Service Jewish Network (JNet) is “a cross-government network of over 300 Jewish civil servants and other civil servants interested in Jewish culture.” According to official data, this amounts to around a quarter of all Jews in the civil service. Their Facebook group has 329 members, though on their X account they claim “over” 400 members, which would be around one third of Jewish civil servants as revealed in government statistics.

It may be the case that there are non-Zionists or anti-Zionists involved in the leadership of the network, but if so there is precious little public sign of this, as we shall see. One view expressed by Matthew Gould the first Jewish British Ambassador to “Israel” was that “I have never come across any anti-Zionism” in the Foreign Office.

Mathew Gould has been a senior sponsor of the Civil Service Jewish Network. Until 2015 Gould was the British Ambassador to “Israel”, where he set up the UK-“Israel” Tech Hub, a unit inside the British embassy which promotes Israeli tech start-ups invariably stuffed with former Israeli intelligence officers. He had previously served in Tehran and in Washington as the UK representative of the Joint Intelligence Committee.  He thus has intelligence connections himself. He says he is a “passionate Zionist”.

Another former senior sponsor was Melinda Simmons, the British Ambassador to Ukraine between 2019 and 2023. She previously worked at the National Security Secretariat, part of the British intelligence apparatus. She had been recruited to the Foreign Office prior to this in 2013, so she likely joined MI6 then. Simmons is a member of the Finchley Reform Synagogue, part of the Movement for Reform Judaism, which says it is “unequivocally Zionist”. It is also, unsurprisingly affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation.

The current senior sponsor is Tamara Finkelstein, who became Permanent Secretary at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in April 2019.  She has been referred to as the most senior “Jewish British civil servant”. Finkelstein hails from a Zionist family with connections to B’nai B’rith and to Reform Judaism which is formally Zionist, attended Haberdashers Girls’ school, something of a hothouse for young Zionists, and then studied Engineering at Balliol College Oxford. After studying economics at LSE, she became a civil servant when she joined the Treasury and later “was a private secretary and speechwriter to Gordon Brown in the early days of his time as Chancellor”.

She also “set up and lead a programme in building safety in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire”. Finkelstein is a member and former Chair of New North London Synagogue, part of the Zionist Masorti Judaism movement. She is also a trustee of Norwood, the Jewish children and families charity, which is affiliated to the pro-“Israel” Jewish Leadership Council. On her appointment as Permanent Secretary the Environment Secretary and hardline Zionist Michael Gove said: “She is an outstanding public servant I have very much enjoyed working with.” Tamara Finkelstein’s brother is militant Zionist Daniel Finkelstein, former chair of the Islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange from 2011-2014.

In addition to one or two senior sponsors, the network has a number of more junior civil servants who run the network. The leaders of the network include (or have included):

Joel Salmon

Joel Salmon at the Department for Levelling Up, where he states he “leads” on “international race and equalities policy.” He is one of two admins for the J-Net Facebook group. He is also a fully radicalised Zionist. His radicalisation appears to have started young, having attended a Zionist secondary School, JFS (2005-12) where he was Head Boy. Having been a member, he then became a “Youth Leader” with the Zionist youth group RSY-Netzer, in 2011, a role he still holds. He belongs to Finchley Reform Synagogue, part of the Movement for Reform Judaism, which is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation. He states he “went on trips with Aish and lived on a religious kibbutz for three months”.

Aish Hatorah is a Zionist organisation that has been implicated in working in illegal settlements especially south of Nablus. It is not clear if the Kibbutz that Salmon lived on was in the illegally occupied West Bank. Salmon interned at BICOM, the pro-“Israel” PR group in London in January 2013, and also at the hardline Neocon Hudson Institute in Washington DC in July and August 2013 while still at university.

While attending St Andrews University Salmon was the president of St Andrews Jewish Society, a Zionist affiliated group. In 2015, he was a candidate for the presidency of the Union of Jewish Students, the umbrella group for all university Jewish Societies, which is also formally Zionist. After university, he went straight into a job as a lobbyist at the Board of Deputies of British Jews (2016-2019). After that, Salmon was a lobbyist for ADS, an arms industry trade association. Amongst its members are the Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems. From there he joined the civil service. It beggars belief that someone with such a long history with racist Zionist organisations can be put in charge of any element of “race and equalities” policy in the Department for Levelling Up.

Joshua Nagli

Joshua Nagli who works at the Department for Transport, and has been a civil servant since 2017. He was previously an Intern at the Portland Trust (Jun 2016) run by the Zionist financier Sir Ronald Cohen. Later he worked for the Union of Jewish Students, rising to the position of Campaigns Director (2015-16). In that capacity he was part of the witch hunt against the Labour left adding his voice to the campaign against Oxford University Labour Club an entirely confected row. He was quoted in the JC as saying, “The events in Oxford, despite them being extremely bad, made people within the Labour Students group realise we need to deal with this issue.” Nagli is also a trustee and director of the London Jewish forum (since 2020) a group that is a member of the pro-Israel Jewish Leadership Council and which is funded by Zionist extremists such as via the family foundations of convicted fraudster Gerald Ronson and the Lewis family who control the clothing chain River Island. It’s not clear how this Zionist activity is compatible with his status as a civil servant.

In addition to this preponderance of Zionists as leaders and sponsors of the network, there has been a pattern of Zionist involvement in the events of the Network. In 2015 and after (such as in 2018) the network was involved with Mitzvah Day, a Zionist-led campaign to infiltrate and subvert Muslim communities, as I have shown elsewhere. Also, from 2015, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has been involved in the network’s Chanukah celebrations inside Whitehall. These have been repeated in  2017 and 2018. The Board has also sponsored Sukkah in the Treasury and Foreign Office, for example in 2018 and 2019, and a networking event in DEFRA in 2019. The Board is a strong supporter of the genocide in Gaza, and has been signed up to the racist ideology of Zionism since the 1940s. It is notable that no Jewish organisation critical of Zionism appears to have had any presence in the network.

If the government is serious about tackling extremism, then it should suspend the Jewish Network and take urgent steps to de-radicalize and de-zionise it.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Original article: almayadeen.net