Calls for greater transparency over foreign lobbying in British politics have reignited after a heated parliamentary debate last week, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK facing fresh scrutiny over its undisclosed links to Israeli lobbying networks. The Westminster Hall debate was convened to discuss a public petition calling for a formal public inquiry into pro-Israel influence over UK politics and democratic institutions. During the debate, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice delivered a fierce rejection of the petition, labeling its core motivation fundamentally antisemitic and calling for it to be thrown out entirely.
What has thrown Tice’s comments into question, however, is the record of official trips that senior Reform figures have taken to Israel, all funded by pro-Israel groups tied to the Israeli government. Just six months before the debate, in September 2024, Tice himself traveled to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli ministers, with the trip fully financed by Reform Friends of Israel (RFI), a little-known pro-Israel lobby group founded to coordinate ties between the party and the Israeli government. A separate trip by a delegation of senior Reform party figures in November 2024, which included a stop in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, was funded directly by the Israeli foreign ministry, investigative journalism outlet Declassified UK revealed this week.
Against this backdrop, questions are mounting over the leadership, funding and objectives of RFI, a group that has never publicly disclosed its donor list. The founding driving force behind RFI is British-born political strategist Jason Pearlman, a figure with deep decades-long ties to both British politics and Israeli official circles. Until December 2024, Pearlman served as international media advisor to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and he continued to work to secure funding for RFI while holding that official Israeli government role. When Pearlman departed his post with Herzog, the Israeli president praised him for guiding the presidency through some of Israel’s most challenging periods with the global press.
Pearlman has since confirmed he has stepped back from his role leading RFI, telling Middle East Eye in a recent interview that he left the group after relocating to Israel for personal reasons, and that he was honored to have helped launch the organization. He has repeatedly refused to name the group’s financial backers, though he denied claims that RFI has ever received funding from the Israeli government or any other foreign state, and claimed there was never any overlap between his work for the Israeli presidency and his work setting up RFI.
Pearlman’s long career in pro-Israel advocacy stretches back decades. Raised in Sunderland, northeast England, Pearlman has deep family roots in the global Zionist movement, with a great-grandmother who famously sat alongside Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, at the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress. After working as media director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews and later in the public affairs department of the Israeli embassy in London, he relocated to Israel in 2006, taking up a role as foreign press liaison for the Israeli government press office a year later. He returned to the UK in 2010 to serve as deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a Westminster-based neoconservative think tank with a long record of strongly pro-Israel advocacy.
HJS’s current director, Alan Mendoza, is another key figure connected to both Reform UK and pro-Israel lobbying circles in the UK. Mendoza serves as a senior foreign affairs advisor to Reform leader Nigel Farage, and also holds the role of president of the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization that has faced widespread international criticism for its role in facilitating the displacement of Palestinian people. JNF UK has donated £1 million ($1.36 million) to what has been described as “Israel’s largest militia”, and counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who faces an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes from the International Criminal Court—as an honorary patron. A former Westminster Conservative councillor, Mendoza defected to Reform UK last year and lost his council seat in the May 2025 UK local elections.
Under Mendoza’s leadership, HJS has exerted significant influence over counter-terrorism policy during successive Conservative UK governments, while maintaining an unapologetically pro-Israel stance. The think tank has faced harsh criticism even from former insiders: co-founder Matthew Jamison later denounced it as a “monstrous animal” and a “deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation”, while former member Marko Atilla Hoare described it as an “abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge” that publishes superficial, polemical content from aspiring commentators. Last year, Mendoza publicly opposed the UK government’s plan to allow family dependants of Palestinian students from Gaza to enter the UK, telling TalkTV that “we don’t know what they believe. We don’t know what their tendencies are. We don’t know whether they mean us well or ill.”
Efforts by Israeli lobbying groups to court Reform UK have ramped up significantly since the second half of 2024. Pearlman previously told Declassified UK that he attended a dinner with Farage and key potential donors while still working for President Herzog, to discuss seed funding for RFI. While he would not name RFI’s current backers, he acknowledged that he expects many donors are overlapping with the groups that fund the long-established pro-Israel lobby groups Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Pearlman is an open, vocal defender of Israeli military actions in Gaza, having written a op-ed for UK outlet LBC earlier this year supporting the US-Israeli attack on Iran and criticizing the current Labour government for failing to offer stronger backing for the strike. He has also repeatedly denied that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in Gaza.
During his September 2024 funded trip to Israel, Tice met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, and later wrote that with the current Labour government openly declaring pro-Palestinian positions from the prime minister down, it falls to other parties in UK parliament to stand with Israel as an ally. He added that during the trip he visited an Israeli border crossing into Gaza, and claimed that widespread reports of famine in Gaza pushed by the United Nations were false, saying his own observations and conversations with what he called “credible top people” convinced him the famine claims were untrue.
Tice’s labeling of the transparency petition as antisemitic during last week’s debate has drawn sharp pushback from the petition’s creator, Andy Kalil. The debate saw most participating MPs who are affiliated with pro-Israel groups echo Tice’s claim that the petition was antisemitic, while a small number of MPs who supported the call for an inquiry raised detailed questions about lobbying and transparency that went unanswered. Kalil has since submitted a formal complaint to Deputy Speaker Nusrat Ghani, obtained by Middle East Eye, arguing that the repeated labeling of the petition, its 118,000 public signatories, and supporting MPs as antisemitic amounts to an sustained attack on a legitimate call for greater transparency and accountability, rather than a serious engagement with the substantive issues raised. Kalil added that the debate failed to address core questions about foreign lobbying, political donations, publicly funded parliamentary trips, and foreign influence, and has called for the debate to be rerun.
Newly unearthed Israeli government data obtained by Berlin-based journalist Yossi Bartel confirms that the Israeli foreign ministry paid more than £50,000 to a Jerusalem-based events firm called Conexión Israel to organize the November 2024 trip for the Reform UK delegation. The delegation included then-Reform chairman David Bull, Lancashire County Council leader Stephen Atkinson, London Assembly member Alex Wilson, and party board member Gawain Towler. During the trip, the group visited sites of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, including the site of the Nova music festival massacre. After the trip, Bull called it “life changing”, and said the group had discussed issues including visa overstayers and asylum seekers with the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Towler said in a statement after the trip that Israel’s fight is “in many ways, our fight” as a shared struggle for “enlightenment ideals, international norms, democracy and the rest.”
In addition to its deepening ties with pro-Israel lobbying networks, Reform UK has also built formal connections with the United Arab Emirates, with Farage meeting senior Emirati ministers earlier this year. Abu Dhabi has reportedly found common ground with Reform over their shared opposition to political Islam, and last September Farage pledged that a Reform government would ban the Muslim Brotherhood, following the lead of multiple Gulf states.
Middle East Eye, which first reported on many of these connections, provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions. Requests for comment from Reform UK have not yet received a response.