In March this year, the UK's new military strategy declared Israel remains a key strategic

partner. What does that mean? And where does it sit in relation to Israel and its continuing

war on Palestine? With me to discuss that today is Mark Curtis, author of many fantastic books

like Secret Affairs, Web of Deceits, UnPeople and The Great Deception. He's also the editor and

co-founder of the classified UK, who stated mission is to uncover Britain's role in the world

by investigating UK foreign, military, intelligence and economic policies. Mark Curtis,

welcome to Downstream. Thanks very much, very pleased to be here. We're very happy to have you.

Let's start from the top. That announcement in March by the British Army that Israel remains

a key strategic partner. What does that mean in practice? Well, what we've seen over the last

three years in particular is a significant deepening of military relations between the UK

and Israel, particularly in the area of training, military training, particularly in the area of

joint military exercises. It seems that around 2018, perhaps early 2019, there were decisions made

to increase training and exercise relations between the two militaries. So, for example,

British Army has trained some Israeli soldiers. In the last couple of years, there's been

significant exercises between the Royal Navy and the Israeli Navy in the Mediterranean,

which is a controversial policy, highly controversial, given the Israeli Navy's participation

and enforcement of the illegal blockade on Gaza. And particularly noteworthy, I think, over

the last couple of years has been the increase in joint exercises involving the two countries'

air forces. So, there was a series of training and exercise operations in 2019, including in

the UK. As far as we know, it's the first time that the Israeli Air Force was invited to the

UK to take part in joint exercises with the RAF, where the two air forces trained using

fast attack jets and simulated ground attacks. So, high-level training, combat training among

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