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David Collier is a British political activist who has been described as an independent researcher, blogger, investigative journalist, and pro-Israel campaigner. His focus is on chronicling anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes.

Background
Collier is British and lived in Israel for 19 or 20 years, between 1987 and 2006. He originally arrived in Israel to work in a kibbutz, then ended up owning a business in tourism-related projects. He is Jewish and a Zionist. His personal blog, "Beyond the Great Divide", is dedicated to "researching anti-Semitism inside anti-Zionist activity". He also wrote a regular blog hosted by the Times of Israel.

According to The Daily Beast, his stated mission is to "expose lies and anti-Semitism". In 2017, he was named one of "The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life" in The Algemeiner's "Jewish 100" list.

Palestine Live
Collier compiled a 250-page dossier on a Facebook group called "Palestine Live" which uncovered a number of featured antisemitic messages. Writing in The Times, columnist Melanie Phillips described the group as "a veritable cesspool of antisemitism", which Collier exposed in "copious detail". According to Kieron Monks in the Middle East Eye, the Facebook group included links to neo-Nazi sites, anti-Semitic cartoons, suggestions that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks, and articles from former KKK leader David Duke. Collier's report claimed that the British Labour Party's then-leader Jeremy Corbyn was a member of the group until just before he became leader in 2015. Corbyn said he believed his name had be added to the group by another person and that he had only responded to a few posts. According to the report, several prominent Corbyn supporters were still Palestine Live members, including the journalist Paul Mason and former shadow cabinet minister Clive Lewis. The Campaign Against Antisemitism used the findings of Collier's report to file a disciplinary complaint to the Labour Party. Several Labour Party members were suspended from their party as a result of the report. The report also brought some activists such as Kenneth O'Keefe to mainstream attention.

Scotland
In 2016, he was commissioned to write a report on anti-semitism in Scotland. The two-year effort focused on the activities of the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign. The report concluded that the group purveys Holocaust denials and other antisemitism. It also asserted there are links between the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and anti-Semitism in Scotland and a correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Israel attitudes were cited in Parliament by Member of Parliament John Mann, the then-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism. and later featured in the annual US State Department Report on International Religious Freedom.

British Labour Party
He compiled a 200-page dossier on the British Labour Party, which was submitted to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) as part of their probe into whether Labour is institutionally antisemitic. In his research, Collier trawled through thousands of social media accounts and Facebook groups. In the dossier, he documented 14 case studies where he claimed Labour Party members had no interest in Israel until Corbyn became the party leader, and then they became "radicalised". The report also alleges an "ethnic cleansing" of Jewish voices from Labour Party online forums.

Ireland
His report in 2021 on Ireland looked at hundreds of posts from Irish social media accounts from what he described as "leading anti-Israel activists". He concluded that antisemitism in Ireland is much more driven from the top down than in the US or UK. Some of the bigotry he documented were comments claiming that The Protocol of the Elders of Zion isn't a hoax and using racist terms like "Shylock". The report explicitly called out a number of Irish politicians, many of them members of the left-wing nationalist Sinn Féin, who had repeated anti-Semitic libels and called for the destruction of Israel. Alan Shatter, who has served as Ireland's Minister of Justice and Equality and also as the Minister of Defence, praised the report an "important piece of research. Shimon Samuels, the Director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center described this report as "outstanding", and its impact as "shattering".

Amnesty International
In 2019, Collier was commissioned to write a report on Amnesty International. The 200-page report alleges the organisation has an institutional anti-Israel bias. The report also documented 40 Amnesty staff members, including volunteers and employees, who shared allegedly antisemitic content online.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Collier attended events of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign undercover. His 79-page report on them documented dozens of examples of antisemitism, hundreds of connections between PSC and anti-semites, and claimed that Jew-hatred was consistently present. He claimed that activists regularly cross the line from legitimate criticism of Israel into anti-semitic tropes and that the PSC only plays lip service to fighting racism within their ranks. According to Kieron Monks, Collier's report concluded that "anti-Semitism is the fuel that primes the PSC engine". Monks agrees that many of the cases of racism covered by the report were genuine and says the report prompted calls for Corbyn to disavow this group.

Meron crowd crush
According to The Jewish Chronicle, following the deadly crowd crush in Meron in 2021 in which 45 participants were trampled to death, Collier reported on Al Jazeera's coverage of the event, and the reader commentary attached to it. Collier found that out of 30,000 comments, more than 10,000 were "either laughing at or loving the fact innocent Jews have died." He said the most vicious comments were the most liked. Collier found significance in the scale of these comments, which he says indicates that it is not just a few individuals.

Pro-Israel activism
According to Kieron Monks, Collier views the Palestinian solidarity movement as a "cult" or "viral ponzi scheme" which is contrary to freedom, debate, and human rights. According to Adi Cohen, Collier believes that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is built on lies and a contrived narrative, and that the movement distorts history in order to justify their current activities.

A debate in Glasgow was scheduled between Collier and Henry Maitles, a professor at the University of the West of Scotland, on the topic of whether Israel is an apartheid state. When Maitles was informed that Collier would be arguing against the proposition he refused to participate. Maitles said he wasn't afraid of debate, but objected to Collier's report which "sought to smear Jeremy Corbyn and indeed the left in general as anti-Semitic"."

In 2020, Collier reported on a 2017 article published in eSharp, a student-run postgraduate journal of University of Glasgow, which he described as "laden with conspiracy, antisemitism and errors". In response to the controversy generated by his report, the university added a disclaimer to the article, apologising for subpar research and describing its content as "antisemitic". The article alleged "an Israeli state-sponsored strategy focused on controlling public opinion in the UK" and to "discredit and neutralise pro-Palestinian discourses". This was followed by a petition signed by 500 scholars, calling on the university to retract the disclaimer. The university republished the article and removed any claim of antisemitism, but maintained a preface that said that the article has caused offence, and "employs some discursive strategies, including a biased selection of sources as well as the misrepresentation of data." Collier described this amendment as "an act of cowardice" that harms people like him, while Jonathan Rosenhead who had helped organise the petition said "The university has completely failed to justify either its original insulting preface, or the need for any preface at all."

David Hirsh credits Collier for recording Ilan Pappé on video confirming that the call for BDS did not originally come from Palestine.

Ban from Twitter
In November 2021, he was temporarily blocked from Twitter after posting photos from the social media account of a Hezbollah supporter.

Criticism
Kieron Monks describes Collier as a pro-Israel advocate and critic of Palestinian activism, instead of an objective racism monitor. Discussing how supporters of Israel set criteria for debate, David Landy says Collier offered three criteria for "academic goodness", whether the academics ever used the words apartheid or genocide when discussing Israel and whether they have ever stated support for BDS.

In an op-ed in Mondoweiss, Jonathan Ofir analysed Collier's report on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign at length and, while agreeing that some of the material outed clear examples of antisemitism, Ofir described Collier's overall approach as similar to that of a man with a machine gun: one gets some hits, but does a lot of collateral damage at the same time. Ofir disputes both Collier's methodology and his conclusions. He refers to Collier as "disingenuous". He says that about 70 of the 79 pages in the report consist of screenshots, used to match a select group in a solidarity march with their posts on social media to arrive at a generalisation. Ofer says that Collier's intent seems to be to tarnish the entire campaign, including all of BDS, and that Collier's research reeks of McCarthyite guilt by association.

Amnesty stated "David Collier is an individual with a very clear agenda. He did not approach us for comment or give us right of reply before publishing any of these allegations." They also said, "Any research outputs produced by Amnesty are subjected to a rigorous review process including multiple layers of approvals by research managers and experts in policy and international law."