The Pentagon flew all 12 of its B-1B bombers out of RAF Fairford over the weekend and sent them home. Those are the aircraft that flew America’s strikes on Iran, and they left a week after British police arrested five men near the base on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts. Andy Burnham, the prime minister, says there are “strong indications” Tehran was behind it.
Israeli security and intelligence services saw it coming. A senior Israeli official told the Telegraph that Israeli intelligence warned MI5 of an imminent Iranian attack on Fairford, and Benjamin Netanyahu says that without the warning, “It would probably have gone through.”
That warning reached London shortly before Sept. 8, which is the day Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary, announced a ban on goods from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. “We gave the Brits the intel,” Netanyahu told Fox News, “and pretty much the next day, they slap sanctions on us.”
London hasn’t let up since. Stephen Doughty, the Middle East minister, told a Labour conference session last week that Britain has now refused or suspended more than 80 arms export licenses for Israel. In September 2024, the number was around 30. Every application now goes through what he calls a “double lock,” the humanitarian-law test plus “the unlawfulness of the occupation.” He called that “a very significant step forward,” and he thinks Britain “could be doing more.”
MI6 well knows the costs. A Labour source close to the service told the Spectator that it “presented warnings about the consequences” and that its officials are “pulling their hair out.” Miliband went ahead anyway.
Ralph Goff, a former CIA station chief, was blunter. “Israel would cut off intelligence-sharing,” he said, and Britain gets the most out of it, “if we take Iran into consideration, where Israel has stronger capabilities.”
Tehran, meanwhile, keeps sending people.
On Saturday, two Iranian nationals stood in a London court charged with preparing acts of terrorism against Manchester’s Jews. Prosecutors say Rahman Salehi and Salam Ahmadyan cased the Manchester Jewish Museum and the Heaton Park synagogue, where two worshippers were killed on Yom Kippur last year. The man they say directed the pair supplied the recipe for a bomb made of chlorine and brake fluid, and the prosecution’s assessment is that he’s an Iranian national “most likely operating from within Iran.” Both men reached Britain by small boat. Salehi had already been granted asylum.
Israel won’t cut off the intelligence, and Britain knows it. Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, says Israel is “extremely insulted” and in the next breath that “nobody wants to hurt national security interests.” That’s the whole of Britain’s bet. It takes the warnings as though it’s owed them and imposes the sanctions as though they cost nothing, because Jerusalem keeps picking up the phone.
America has a stake in that bet that London keeps leaving out. The bombers on that runway were ours, and the warning about the base came from Israel, through a relationship Britain keeps drawing down three weeks before Israelis go to the polls.
If a British government wants to treat Israel as a pariah, it should at least stop treating Israel’s intelligence as a free service. Washington, whose planes were parked there, is the one ally London can’t afford to ignore, and it should make that clearer before the next warning comes in.
Uriel Zehavi is managing director of the Mitzpe Institute (mitzpe.org), an educational program of the Atlanta Israel Coalition, and writes the daily Israel Brief (israelbrief.com). He is the author of four books, most recently Rooted in Judea: Lives and Law in the Heart of Israel.