Former Israel Embassy staffer exposed in ‘The Lobby’ wins local council seat for Labour 

A former staff member at the Embassy of Israel in London who featured in the sensational Al Jazeera documentary “The Lobby” has been elected as a Labour councillor in last week’s local election. With fewer than two thousand votes, Ella Rose took the council seat in Whetstone ward of the London Borough of Barnet. She said that she was “deeply honoured” to be part of the now Labour-controlled borough.

Rose was featured in the 2017 four-part documentary which exposed a senior political officer at the Israeli Embassy, Shai Masot, talking about a plot to “take down” foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan, as well as other MPs deemed to be critical of Israeli policy.

As the then director of Israeli advocacy group the Jewish Labour Movement, Rose was caught on camera reacting angrily to The Electronic Intifada’s revelation that she had previously worked at the embassy. A photo in The Electronic Intifada article showed Rose at a January 2015 meeting with then Prime Minister David Cameron which discussed opposition to “boycotts and the delegitimisation of Israel.”

READ: Al Jazeera documentary shows pro-Israeli lobby groups organising ‘fake protests’

Rose is heard wishing for her critics to “die in a hole” and using expletives in the programme. The footage shows her referring to her critics as “anti-Semites, the lot of them,” and expressing a wish for violent revenge against her enemies, including Jewish activist Jackie Walker, a long-time anti-racist and anti-Zionist member of the Labour Party.

“I saw Jackie Walker on Saturday and thought, you know what, I could take her, she’s like 5’2 and tiny,” Rose said in an apparent threat to the now ex-Labour activist. “That’s why I can take Jackie Walker. Krav Maga training.” This was a reference to the Israeli army’s hand-to-hand fighting technique. “I’m not bad at it. If it came to it I would win, that’s all I really care about.”

Several party members wrote to Labour complaining about Rose’s conduct in the video. An investigation was closed after just nine days. One of the individuals who lodged a complaint against her accused Labour’s General Secretary at the time, Iain McNicol, of a “whitewash”.

READ: UK Labour canvasses with Israel politicians in effort to win Jewish votes

According to The Electronic Intifada, McNicol conceded to the complainant that he had “conducted an investigation into the allegations which you made,” and accepted that “some of the language which Ms. Rose is filmed using does fall below the standards expected of Labour Party members.”

However, he went on to say that since Rose had “made clear” to him that “she was not a violent person” and that she had been “engaged in a private conversation with someone she considered to be a friend… Ms. Rose’s comments did not constitute a threat.”

Rose was outed in 2016 as having worked in the Israeli Embassy where she is believed to have been employed as a public affairs officer between September 2015 and August 2016.