Against the backdrop of Bristol’s historic city centre skyline, two new high-rise towers are climbing steadily skyward. The St James House development, now under construction in southwest England’s largest urban hub, pairs a 28-story purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) block with an 18-story co-living space targeted at young working professionals. When complete, the student tower will become the tallest structure in a city whose skyline has long been defined by modest, low-rise architecture – and it will also tie Bristol’s legacy of mercantile capitalism and radical grassroots activism directly to Israeli financial networks, pro-Israel lobbying in the UK, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The £1 billion+ development portfolio that includes St James House is backed by two major investors: global real estate investment firm Cain International and Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel’s largest pension and insurance groups. This project is far from an isolated investment: it is part of a growing flood of global capital pouring into UK student housing, a sector that has boomed alongside decades of expansion in Britain’s higher education system. At the turn of the 21st century, roughly 2 million students were enrolled in UK universities; today that number sits close to 3 million, with international students accounting for nearly a quarter of all enrolments. Severe cuts to public university funding starting in 2010 and a cap on domestic undergraduate tuition fees have left British institutions increasingly dependent on high-fee paying overseas students, the majority of whom in Bristol come from China and India. This group overwhelmingly prefers premium purpose-built accommodation over alternative housing options, creating a lucrative market for global investors.
For financial backers like Cain and Menora Mivtachim, the UK student housing sector offers uniquely stable, high returns: lower regulatory space standards, consistently high occupancy rates, annual rent adjustments, and the ability to house large student populations at high densities all reduce investment risk. Bristol offers particularly favorable conditions: the city’s student population has grown by 50% over the past decade, while purpose-built housing supply has failed to keep pace, creating one of the largest accommodation shortfalls in the UK. This gap has simultaneously driven up rental costs across the city’s broader housing market, pushing home ownership and even private rental out of reach for growing numbers of Bristol residents. Just steps from the St James House construction site, unhoused people camp in a central roundabout plaza; encampments also dot city parks and green spaces, and rising numbers of people living in vehicles have forced the local council to develop dedicated overnight parking sites.
Neither Cain International nor Menora Mivtachim responded to detailed requests for comment from Middle East Eye for this reporting. For both firms, investment in UK student housing marks a shift from their core business lines. Founded in 2014, Cain focuses primarily on luxury real estate investments in major global cities alongside private equity holdings in lifestyle, hospitality, and entertainment brands. The firm manages roughly $14 billion in global assets, with flagship projects including luxury Dubai hotels and the $billion-plus One Beverly Hills development anchored by the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. Tel Aviv-based Menora Mivtachim, by contrast, is one of Israel’s oldest and largest financial services groups, managing retirement savings, insurance reserves, and investments for 2 million Israeli customers.
According to Israeli research centre Who Profits, Menora Mivtachim is a major investor in Israeli military infrastructure projects in the Negev Desert via public-private partnership agreements. These investments include the sprawling “City of Training Bases,” built to house 10,000 permanent Israeli military personnel, and Kiryat HaModi’in, a massive intelligence and cyber campus for the Israeli military’s elite intelligence units. The firm also holds a substantial stake in Shikun and Binui, a construction firm deeply involved in building occupation and settlement infrastructure in the occupied West Bank, and is a major shareholder in G1 Secure Solutions, one of Israel’s largest private security and electronic surveillance companies.
Menora Mivtachim first entered Cain’s UK student housing platform in September 2023, injecting £500 million ($670 million) into a joint portfolio with developers Fusion Group and Olympian Homes. Cain expanded the portfolio through further acquisitions – including the St James House site in Bristol – throughout 2024, and Menora Mivtachim added additional capital later that year, pushing the portfolio’s total gross development value past $1 billion. Today, the portfolio includes student developments across Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds and York, with Cirrus Point, a 45-story, 660-bed tower nearing completion in Leeds, ranking as both the city’s tallest building and the tallest purpose-built student accommodation tower in the world.
Cain’s founder and CEO Jonathan Goldstein is a leading figure in UK pro-Israel lobbying, having previously served as chair of the pro-Israel Jewish Leadership Council (JLC). Goldstein played a central role in the high-profile 2010s campaign against former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which centered on accusations that Corbyn failed to address antisemitism within the party. In 2021, Goldstein stated that if Corbyn had become prime minister and the pro-Israel lobby had not mounted its campaign, “we’d never have forgiven ourselves.”
Goldstein began his career as a corporate solicitor and counted prominent pro-Israeli property tycoon Gerald Ronson – a key figure in UK pro-Israel institutions including the JLC, Community Security Trust (CST), and Bicom – as his “unparalleled mentor.” During the Corbyn era, Goldstein labeled the Labour leader “un-British” and argued he had made British Jews feel unwelcome in the UK. Today, he is a close ally and backer of current Labour leader Keir Starmer, hosting Starmer in the directors’ box at Chelsea Football Club, in which Goldstein holds a co-ownership stake, in 2022.
Goldstein’s ties to the current Labour leadership stretch back years. Alongside fellow pro-Israel businessman Trevor Chinn – a primary funder of Labour Together, the internal faction that worked to oust Corbyn and install Starmer – Goldstein donated to David Lammy’s 2015 campaign for London Labour mayoral candidate. Lammy’s campaign director was David Mencer, a former employee of Ronson and former director of Labour Friends of Israel who has since become a high-profile, belligerent spokesperson for the Israeli government during its military campaign in Gaza. As UK Foreign Secretary, Lammy has repeatedly rejected claims that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza.
As JLC chair, Goldstein has held multiple meetings with senior Israeli political figures including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister and diplomat Gilad Erdan. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Goldstein wrote in the *Times of Israel* that “We must give our unstinting and total support to whatever action Israel determines in its absolute discretion as an appropriate response to this atrocity.” In a November 2023 interview with Piers Morgan, he condemned the large pro-Palestine protests that swept British cities, defended Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Hamas’ senior leadership command center was located beneath a Gaza hospital. Declassified diary entries from former Israeli ambassador to the UK Tzipi Hotovely confirm that Goldstein met with Hotovely for strategic discussions while the Gaza genocide was already underway.
Bristol’s modern identity is shaped by two conflicting historical legacies: once England’s second city, its position as a major Atlantic port allowed 18th-century merchants to amass enormous wealth from the transatlantic slave trade, tobacco, and sugar, while it also emerged as a historic hub for radical political dissent that challenged British establishment power. These competing currents are on stark display in the city’s current response to Gaza: Bristol is one of the UK’s most active centers for Palestine solidarity, hosting regular marches, vigils, fundraisers, and boycott campaigns, and is home to the UK’s only Palestine Museum and Cultural Centre, located in the heart of its Old City. Direct action campaigns targeting Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, which operates a facility in the city’s northern defence industrial cluster, have drawn nationwide attention. In the 2024 general election, Bristol Central – a constituency with a large university population – elected Green Party MP Carla Denyer, who defeated incumbent Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire on a platform driven by widespread anger at Labour’s complicity in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
It is a deep historical irony, rooted in Bristol’s longstanding internal tensions, that the city’s new tallest building will be anchored to the global financial and political networks that sustain Israel’s campaign in Gaza and enable its impunity in Western political circles. These networks extend far beyond the UK, connecting Cain and Menora Mivtachim to a broader web of Israeli, Gulf, and American interests that span politics, diplomacy, and real estate speculation. Menora Mivtachim provided a $30 million investment to Jared Kushner’s Kushner Companies in 2017, just before Kushner began his role as then-President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy. Though Jared stepped down as CEO to take the role, he retained significant ownership stakes in the family firm; his father Charles Kushner, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump who now serves as US Ambassador to France, has longstanding close personal ties to Netanyahu, who frequently stayed at the Kushner family home during visits to the US when he was a rising political figure.
Earlier this year, Cain launched a joint venture with Kushner Companies to finance luxury residential and mixed-use developments in South Florida, tying the firm directly to a family that played a central role in negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab states. After leaving the White House, Kushner founded private equity firm Affinity Partners, which received a $2 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) in 2022 to build an “investment corridor” between Gulf capital and Israeli businesses. Cain already operates within this same Gulf sovereign capital ecosystem: in 2022, the firm joined PIF in a $900 million joint investment in Aman Group, the global luxury hotel and resort brand. In 2025, Cain opened an office in Abu Dhabi and formed a partnership with Mubadala Capital, the private equity and asset management arm of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, to deploy billions of dollars in luxury real estate investments. Mubadala has emerged as a leading global investor and a key vehicle for Emirati investment in Israel’s technology sector in the wake of the Abraham Accords.
As the original reporting notes, the overlapping logics of speculative real estate investment and Israeli occupation stretch from New York’s skyscraper corridor to Gulf desert metropolises, through the post-Abraham Accords investment framework and the controversial “Gaza Riviera” development plan, and now to British university cities like Bristol. St James House is scheduled to open in time for the 2028/29 academic year, and will stand as a permanent monument to the flows of financial and political capital that sustain Israel’s expansionist policies and enable ongoing impunity for its actions in Gaza. Where 18th-century Bristol’s merchant elite could separate their city’s streets from the suffering of enslaved people transported across the Atlantic, the glass-and-steel exterior of Bristol’s new tallest tower cannot obscure the reality of ethnic cleansing and genocide that it underwrites.