Hilary Aked

Hilary Aked is a freelance writer and researcher, qualified journalist and PhD student at the University of Bath. She has worked in the Occupied Territories and is researching the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, specifically looking at pro-Israel actors’ attempts to suppress the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Her thesis investigates the power structure of the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, stemming from an understanding of Zionism as a transnational movement, as the BDS movement is today. It examines Israel’s crisis of legitimacy, particularly post-2000 and traces the career of the ‘delegitimisation’ label as a means of understanding how a ‘neo-Zionist’ thought collective has sought to offer a re-interpretation of Israel’s current reality as the intellectual basis for anti-BDS activism. It argues that the boycott issue has increasingly become a litmus-test of Zionist loyalty and the focus for attempts to build a counteracting ‘big tent Zionism’.

These strands come together in case studies drawn from a range of civil society arenas in which BDS has been contested using a range of strategies, from discourses of civility and normalisation to harder ‘lawfare’ tactics including criminalisation. It interrogates the pro-Israel lobby as an industry and assesses how far the pushback against BDS represents an elite backlash in light of the fact that it also seems to be provoking fragmentation and radicalisation at the grassroots.

She is also working on a Spinwatch project on Islamophobia, focusing on the counterjihad movement and its mainstream enablers, funded by the Open Society Foundation.