New Labour MP is married to former Israeli spy recruiter

Damien Egan’s ex-soldier husband Yossi Felberbaum recruited Unit 8200 officers.

First published by The Electronic Intifada.

Former Israeli soldier Yossi Felberbaum and his husband Damien Egan (holding center sign) campaigning with leading Jewish Labour Movement activists. (JLM/X)

A new UK Labour Party lawmaker is married to a former Israeli soldier who recruited from Israel’s deadly Unit 8200 spy agency.

Damien Egan, candidate for the UK’s main opposition party, won a by-election in the southwestern English constituency of Kingswood on Friday.

As the result was announced, he was photographed celebrating with his Israeli husband, the Google software developer Yossi Felberbaum.

But the British media failed to report one crucial fact: Felberbaum is a former recruiter of officers from the deadly Israeli spy agency known as Unit 8200.

The signals and cyber-warfare arm of Israel’s military intelligence, Unit 8200 plays a vital role in the targeting, murder, blackmail and mass surveillance of Palestinians.

In a Facebook posting from 2017, a group called Birthright Israel Excel wrote that Felberbaum had been in the Israeli military for six years.

They explained that Felberbaum had played “an important role” acting as one of their liaisons with the Israeli military, “assisting with recruitment of 8200 unit soldiers as Israeli Peers.”

Birthright Israel Excel is a 10-week Tel Aviv internship program which recruits Jewish college students from selected universities – mostly in North America and Europe – and links them up with Israeli companies, mostly in the high-tech sector.

Their interns are all matched with an “Israeli Peer” to guide them through the program. Judging from their Facebook posting about Felberbaum, however, it seems that at least some of these “peers” are actually Unit 8200 spies.

Unit 8200’s role has vastly expanded in the last two decades, and its infiltration of the global high tech industryhas similarly grown.

In 2014, whistleblowers shed new light on the all-encompassing nature of Unit 8200’s mass surveillance system that dominates Palestinian life.

In testimonies to The Guardian, they revealed that Unit 8200 officers boasted to each other about “blood on the headset” – the X’s they marked there after each assassination of a Palestinian.

“Any information that might enable extortion of an individual is considered relevant,” one Unit 8200 reservist explained. “Whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife, or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank – he is a target for blackmail.”

Another explained that “any Palestinian is exposed to nonstop monitoring by the Israeli Big Brother, without legal protection, and with no way of knowing when they too would become an objective – targeted for harassment, extortion or physical injury.”

Those in Labour who are celebrating Egan and Felberbaum’s same-sex relationship are undermined by the history of Unit 8200’s cynical and deadly targeting of Palestinians in same-sex relationships.

Mass assassination factory

Although one of Yossi Felberbaum’s social media profiles confirms he was in the Israeli military for years, it is unclear whether he was himself a Unit 8200 officer.

His LinkedIn profile as of this writing lists more than five years as a software engineer for the Israeli military, building systems for “customers inside the organization.”

Unit 8200 is part of Aman – the Israel military’s intelligence agency. It is therefore highly likely that at least some of those internal “customers” were in fact from Unit 8200.

Added to that, the Birthright Israel Excel posting specified that Felberbaum was responsible within that organization for “recruitment of 8200 unit soldiers,” assigned to watch over their interns while on the program in Israel.

At a minimum, therefore, Felberbaum had close contact with Unit 8200 spies, and may well have been an actual Unit 8200 officer himself.

There is also the question of what the software systems Felberbaum was helping to engineer for the Israeli military were actually designed to do. His LinkedIn page does not reveal this.

In December there was some international media coverage of “The Gospel,” the AI software system that Israel uses to help it target civilians in Gaza en masse.

Sources familiar with how AI-based systems have been integrated into the Israeli military’s operations told The Guardian that the tools had significantly sped up the target-creation process.

“It really is like a factory,” one source said. “We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

Another source told Israeli website +972 Magazine that The Gospel was essentially a “mass assassination factory” and that the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.”

Israel’s war in Gaza has so far killed at least 30,000 Palestinians, more than 12,000 of whom were children.

Israel’s infiltration of Labour

This is not even the first time the British Labour Party has been infiltrated by Israelis in recent years.

In 2021 The Electronic Intifada revealed how former left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn’s right-wing successor Keir Starmer had hired former Unit 8200 officer Assaf Kaplan to monitor social media and keep tabs on Labour’s membership base.

After we broke the story, Kaplan scrubbed his social media of any mention of Unit 8200, but not before we had taken screenshots of all the evidence. Labour later faced questions from human rights lawyers about the hiring of Kaplan.

Speaking to Middle East Eye, former Labour minister Chris Mullin denounced Labour’s hiring of Kaplan: “I am not sure if this is a good idea. Is he still working for the Israelis or for the Labour Party?”

If Felberbaum really was a Unit 8200 officer, it is possible that Labour learned from its experiences with Kaplan and encouraged him to scrub his own social media in advance.

The Electronic Intifada understands from sources that Kaplan still worked for Starmer in June. He likely still works for him today.

On his social media, he reposted a Labour job listing as recently as September.

Damien Egan himself is a member of the Jewish Labour Movement, a lobby group closely tied to theIsraeli embassy.

Born in Ireland, Egan was raised a Catholic but converted to Judaism, reportedly after meeting Felberbaum in 2016.

The Jewish Labour Movement, which admitted in October to playing a key role in the downfall of Corbyn, has been a supporter of Egan since at least 2017.

Egan, for his part, has long promoted the Israel lobby’s bogus assertions about an “anti-Semitism crisis” in the Labour Party and on the British left as a way to protect Israel from the consequences of its genocidal actions against the Palestinians.

The Labour Party, Damien Egan and Yossi Felberbaum did not respond to requests for comment.