In 2015, Jodie Evans, co-founder of the radical protest group Code Pink, took to Twitter – as it was then known – to demand that China “stop brutal repression of their women’s human rights defenders”. An unremarkable sentiment from a self-styled feminist peace activist. Ten years on, however, her group is under investigation by two American congressional committees, accused of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a network linked to the Chinese Communist Party to fund pro-Gaza marches on the streets of London.
The allegations have yet to be proved, but notice what Code Pink doesn’t do. It doesn’t organise marches for the Uyghurs, who are undergoing such appalling persecution in Xinjiang.
It doesn’t picket the Chinese embassy over Hong Kong, or Tibet, or the container ships taking the products of Chinese forced labour to Britain’s high streets. It doesn’t campaign against Russia, either, or North Korea or Iran.
Rather, its energy, and apparently its funding, goes entirely one way: against RAF bases; against Nato; against “Zionism”. The organisation now warns darkly that the West is being “manipulated” into confrontation with China, which is quite the pivot for a woman who once condemned Beijing’s human rights record.
More proof, as if it was needed, that “Palestine” has the capacity to send people crazy. In recent years, Code Pink has organised numerous protests against “the genocide in Gaza”, demonstrated outside RAF Akrotiri – which was used for surveillance flights over Gaza – and claimed that Britain’s leaders were “bought by Zionism”.
So far, so familiar. What sets this aside, however, is the alleged involvement of a hostile foreign state. Alicia Kearns, a Tory MP, told the Telegraph that Beijing runs “cut-outs” who “industrialise interference in our democracy, organising and deploying groups parroting seditious Chinese Communist Party narratives”. The Government must use the National Security Act to prosecute them, she said. If the allegations are correct, this would make activists themselves, in the oldest Cold War sense, useful idiots, requiring nothing more complicated than narcissistic moral certainty in working for the enemy.
To anybody with a pair of eyes and a functioning brain, it is obvious that a good deal of the pro-Hamas material now flooding both Britain’s streets and timelines is not simply organically generated. Grief over dead children in Gaza may have a genuine quality, albeit as a naïve response to propaganda, but it would be no surprise if what supports it – the marches with the identical slogans, the money trails leading back into the shadows, the RAF bases picketed and attacked – is at least partly manufactured by hostile states that care not about the Palestinians but a distracted, divided West.
Gaza was never just a war. It is the single most fought-over piece of information terrain on Earth, and the fight is heavily weighted against us. After October 7, the analytics firm Cyabra found that a quarter of the accounts interacting with the most popular anti-Israel influencers on X were fake, built to amplify a small number of posts until they take on the appearance of consensus.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracked social media in the fortnight after October 7, found Iranian outlets glorifying the Hamas attack as a strategic triumph while blaming Washington for the dead in Gaza; Russian accounts, meanwhile, wove the same material into an anti-Western, anti-Ukraine narrative they had been running for years anyway.
These separate operations, the ISD noted, nonetheless amplified one another until they morphed into a single campaign, albeit in different accents. Over that same fortnight, ISD logged a fiftyfold spike in antisemitic comments on YouTube.
Which brings us to the effect upon the British public. YouGov’s polling shows that only 12 per cent of Britons now say they sympathise with Israel, the lowest figure recorded since the attacks of October 7, while 38 per cent sympathise most with the Palestinians, a record high. Shifts of that size and speed, tracked so closely against a documented flood of bot-amplified, state-linked content, are not simply the product of Britons seeing the news and drawing their own conclusions. Somebody, it seems, has been putting well-funded thumbs on the scale.
The problem is that it is difficult to prove. Given the number of pro-Palestinian activists who spread propaganda on an entirely voluntary basis, it can be impossible to separate the foreign influence from the feeding frenzy of Israelophobia. It goes right back: where did the claim that an Israeli strike had killed five hundred people at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City come from? What about the AI-generated images of bloodied, abandoned Gazan infants with an odd curl in the fingers or an unnatural shimmer in the eye, which are always viewed millions of times before anyone thinks to check where they came from? What about the marchers brandishing Hezbollah’s flag in plain view of the police on a march in London?
“We know that during the Cold War, Russia funded sympathetic political movements in the West,” said Tim Law, Britain's former defence attaché in Beijing. “If people connected in any way to the Chinese Communist Party are doing the same now, there is a real risk to our democracy that must not be ignored.”
The Government – now led by a man who gave his first interview to Gary Lineker – says it will “take whatever action is necessary” to protect British democracy from state-backed subversion.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, the next time you’re making your way through central London and someone hands you a leaflet about “Israeli genocide” or ending “settler colonialist imperialism”, it might be worth asking them whether they are funded by dark money from a different sort of empire.
Ironically, they might not even know the answer themselves.
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