David Collier (political activist)

David Collier is a political activist based in London. He has also has been described as an independent researcher, blogger, investigative journalist, and pro-Israel campaigner. He is known for his investigative reports on antisemitism in the UK and Ireland.
Background
Collier is British and lived in Israel for 20 years, 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. In 2017, he was named one of "The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life" in The Algemeiner's "Jewish 100" list.
Reports
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, and suggestions that Israel was responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was an active member of the group but says he left in 2015. 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. and published under the title “Jew Hate and Holocaust Denial in Scotland”. The report consists mainly of screenshots of social media posts by Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign members and activists. Collier included only posts which are unquestionably antisemetic (repeating antisemitic tropes such as rich Jews, greedy Jews, cunning Jews who control the world, as well as Holocaust denial), and intentionally excluded any post which merely equated Israel with Nazi Germany or accused Israel for committing genocide so as to pre-empt the claim that these were "legitimate criticism of Israel". The report' findings, which 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, leader of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism. and later featured in the annual US State Department Report on International Religious Freedom.
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 a probe into whether Labour is institutionally antisemitic. In Collier's 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 "radicalized". The report also alleges an an “ethnic cleansing” of Jewish voices from Labour party online forums.
His report 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 the Elders of Zion aren't a hoax and using racist terms like "Shylock".
Alan Shatter who has served as Ireland's Minster of Justice and Equality and also as the Minister of Defense 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".
In 2019, JHRW commissioned Collier to write a report on Amnesty International. Collier compiled a 200-page report which he says shows the organization has an institutional anti-Israel bias. The report documented 40 Amnesty staff members, including volunteers and employees, who shared allegedly antisemitic content online.
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.
pro-Israel activism
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 if is Israel is an apartheid state. When Maitles was informed that Collier would be arguing against the proposition he refused to participate, saying that Collier's "recent involvement in a report which sought to smear Jeremy Corbyn and indeed the left in general as anti-Semitic meant that i did not want to give legitimacy to any aspect of his work" and that "I have a history of engaging in debate and am not afraid of it. Just three weeks ago I debated at a conference in Vienna on the left and anti-Semitism. There does though come a point where I am not prepared to give credibility to someone who has produced a scurrilous, poorly researched smear on Corbyn and the left as antisemitic."
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, apologizing for subpar research and describing its content as “antisemitic”. The article referenced Collier in what it called a "an Israeli state-sponsored strategy focused on controlling public opinion in the UK" that seek to "discredit and neutralise pro-Palestinian discourses". Collier described this amendment as “an act of cowardice” that harms people like him, while Jonathan Rosenhead who had helped organize the petition said "The university has completely failed to justify either its original insulting preface, or the need for any preface at all. It seems that it is trying desperately both to move and not to move; it’s trying to make a change which will defuse the academic anger about what it’s done without triggering a new burst of hostilities from defenders of Israel, and it seems to me quite possible it will have satisfied neither."
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. Monks describes Collier as a pro-Israel advocate and critic of Palestinian activism, instead of an objective racism monitor. <ref name="monks"/>
Ban from Twitter
In November 2021, he was temporarily blocked from Twitter after posting photos from the social media account of a Hezbollah supporter.<ref name=twitter_block/>

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