How Bristol’s tallest tower will be tied to Israel’s atrocities

In the centre of Bristol, two towers are rising slowly into the sky. 

St James House, a new development now under construction in southwest England’s largest city, will consist of one 28-storey building to house students and another 18-storey “co-living” block aimed at young professionals.

The purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) tower will become the dominant feature of a city centre skyline that has historically remained relatively modest in scale. 

It will also tie Bristol, a city with a rich and often dark dual history of both mercantile capitalism and radical activism, to Israel, pro-Israeli lobbying in the UK and the genocide in Gaza.

Funded by the real estate investment firm Cain International, together with Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel’s largest pension and insurance groups, the scheme is typical of a city where global capital has been increasingly flowing into office developments, build-to-rent flats and, especially, student accommodation.

St James House is just the latest student tower built in the UK by Cain and Menora Mivtachim, whose combined portfolio covers developments in Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds and York. 

The crude logics of speculation and occupation run from the high-rise towers of New York to the desert metropolises of the Gulf, through the 'Gaza Riviera' plan, and on to British university cities like Bristol

Cirrus Point, a 45-storey, 660-bed development nearing completion in Leeds, is not only the city’s tallest building but also the tallest purpose-built student accommodation tower in the world. 

The boom in student accommodation has been underpinned by the expansion of higher education in Britain, from around two million students at the start of the century to almost three million today. 

A significant share of this expansion has come from overseas students, who now account for almost a quarter of all enrolments. 

Government funding for universities has been slashed since 2010 and undergraduate fees for British students are capped, leaving universities increasingly reliant on international students, who pay much higher fees. 

Many of these – in Bristol, predominantly from China and India – are also more likely to want to live in premium purpose-built student accommodation than other forms of housing.

Lower space standards, dependable occupancy rates, annual rent resets and the ability to accommodate large numbers of students at high densities all help to provide strong, stable returns for investors like Cain and Menora Mivtachim. 

Conditions are particularly advantageous in Bristol. The student population has grown by around 50 percent over the past decade, while the supply of dedicated student accommodation has failed to keep pace, leading to one of the largest shortfalls in the country. 

At the same time, the city’s wider housing market has become increasingly unaffordable. 

That reality is reflected on the city's streets. Directly opposite the St James House construction site, a concrete plaza in the middle of a roundabout is frequently home to people sleeping in tents. 

Encampments can be found in parks and green spaces across Bristol, while the number of people living on the roadside in vehicles has increased to such an extent that the council has been forced to start developing a series of dedicated sites. 

Middle East Eye contacted Cain and Menora Mivtachim for this article, but neither company responded to the list of detailed questions that were sent.

Investing in Israel's military

For both Cain and Menora Mivtachim, student accommodation is something of a departure from their usual lines of business.

Since its founding in 2014, Cain has focused primarily on high-end real estate investments in major global cities, alongside a private equity business geared towards lifestyle, hospitality and entertainment brands. 

The firm manages around $14bn of assets worldwide, with flagship developments including luxury hotels in Dubai and One Beverly Hills, a multi-billion-dollar, 17.5-acre scheme centred on the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles.

Tel Aviv-based Menora Mivtachim is one of Israel's largest and longest-established insurance and financial services groups, managing the retirement savings, insurance reserves and investments of around two million customers. 

According to the research centre Who Profits, Menora Mivtachim is a significant investor in Israeli military infrastructure projects in the Negev desert through public-private partnership deals.

These include the vast “City of Training Bases”, built to accommodate around 10,000 permanent military personnel, and Kiryat HaModi’in, a massive intelligence and cyber campus for the Israeli military’s intelligence units.

Menora Mivtachim has a substantial shareholding in Shikun and Binui, a construction company with significant involvement in settlement and occupation infrastructure in the West Bank, and is a major shareholder in G1 Secure Solutions, one of Israel's largest private security and electronic-surveillance companies.

In September 2023, Menora Mivtachim made its first direct investment into Cain’s rapidly expanding British student tower plan through a £500m ($670m) transaction involving schemes with developers Fusion Group and Olympian Homes. 

During 2024, Cain expanded the platform through further acquisitions, including St James House in Bristol, before Menora Mivtachim committed additional capital towards the end of the year, helping to take the portfolio’s gross development value beyond $1bn.

Campaign against Corbyn

The founder and CEO of Cain is Jonathan Goldstein, former chair of the pro-Israel Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), who played a leading role in campaigns accusing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of failing to tackle antisemitism. 

Referring to a “campaign” spearheaded by the JLC, the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust (CST), Goldstein said in 2021 that if Corbyn had become prime minister, “and we hadn’t done this, we’d never have forgiven ourselves”.

Beginning his career as a corporate solicitor, Goldstein went on to work closely with property magnate Gerald Ronson, describing him as an “unparalleled mentor”. 

Ronson is a long-time supporter of Israel and a prominent figure within Britain's pro-Israel institutional network, with longstanding links to organisations including the CST, the JLC and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom).

He wrote in his autobiography that while serving a prison sentence in the early 1990s over his role in the Guinness share-trading fraud, he spoke to Israel’s then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir on the phone and met Benjamin Netanyahu, at that time a minister in Shamir’s government, while on day release. 

During the Corbyn years, Goldstein described the Labour leader as “un-British” and argued that he had made many British Jews feel unwelcome. 

Goldstein was noted by the Times in a recent interview as “a backer and a friend of Sir Keir Starmer”, and in 2022 hosted Starmer personally in the directors’ box at Chelsea football club, which he co-owns.

Funding Lammy, meeting Netanyahu

His closeness to senior Labour Party figures is not a recent development. 

Along with another pro-Israel businessman, Trevor Chinn, who was one of the principal financial backers of Labour Together - the factional internal project that set out to undermine Corbyn and instal Starmer as leader - Goldstein donated money to David Lammy’s campaign to be Labour candidate for London mayor in 2015. 

The director of Lammy’s campaign was David Mencer, another former employee of Gerald Ronson, as well as a former director of Labour Friends of Israel. 

He became familiar to viewers of British TV news during Israel’s assault on Gaza as a belligerent spokesperson for the Israeli government, a position he still holds. While Lammy, during his time in office as foreign secretary, strongly opposed the idea that a genocide was being carried out. 

As chair of the JLC, Goldstein met with senior Israeli political figures such as Netanyahu and Gilad Erdan, a former minister and diplomat.

Writing in the Times of Israel after the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, Goldstein said: “We must give our unstinting and total support to whatever action Israel determines in its absolute discretion as an appropriate response to this atrocity.”

In November 2023, speaking to Piers Morgan, he criticised the large pro-Palestine demonstrations taking place in Britain and defended Israel's military campaign in Gaza, repeating the unsubstantiated claim that the main nerve centre of the Hamas leadership was under a hospital. 

Goldstein appears to have maintained high-level access to Israeli state officialdom. Diary entries for then-Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, show that the property tycoon met with her while the Gaza genocide was taking place.

Bristol's two strands

Bristol was once known as England’s second city, when its position as a westward-looking port enabled its merchants to grow rich through tobacco, sugar and the transatlantic slave trade. 

At the same time, it began to develop into a centre for non-conformist religion and political dissent that challenged the British establishment. These two strands - predatory commercial activity and political radicalism – continue to define the city today.

Nowhere is this more visible than over the issue of Gaza. 

The direct action campaign against Elbit Systems, the Israeli weapons manufacturer with facilities located among a cluster of defence and aerospace companies on the city's northern edge, has been a high-profile example of this dynamic. 

Bristol is also one of the country’s most active hubs for the Palestine solidarity movement, seeing regular city-centre marches, vigils, fundraising events, and boycott campaigns.

It is home to the Palestine Museum and Cultural Centre, the only museum in the UK dedicated to Palestinian culture and history, which can be found in the heart of the Old City. 

And in 2024, the Bristol Central constituency - strongly influenced by its university student and graduate population – elected one of the UK's few Green MPs, Carla Denyer, who won her seat from Labour incumbent Thangam Debbonaire largely on the back of anger at the party’s complicity with the ongoing destruction of Gaza.

It is a deep irony then, though one in keeping with the historic tensions of Bristol, that its tallest-ever building will directly link the city to the financial and political networks that have helped sustain Israel's genocide and ensure its continued toleration by western and Middle Eastern states.

Gulf capital, Israel and the Kushner family 

These networks are part of a wider web of investment, diplomacy and political connections centred on Israel and the Middle East.

Cain and Menora Menora Mivtachim, both of which did not respond to MEE’s questions, are part of this. So too is the Kushner family real estate empire. 

In 2017, shortly before Jared Kushner's first official visit to Israel as his father-in-law Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, Kushner Companies received a $30m investment from Menora Mivtachim. 

Kushner had stepped down as chief executive to take up his new diplomatic role but retained substantial ownership interests in the family business.

His father, the once-convicted felon Charles Kushner, who was pardoned by Trump and then appointed as US ambassador to France, was so close to Benjamin Netanyahu that the rising Likud politician would stay at the Kushner family home during visits to the US, with the young Jared reportedly giving up his own bedroom for Netanyahu.

Earlier this year, Cain announced their own joint venture with Kushner Companies to finance high-end residential and mixed-use developments in South Florida. The partnership links Cain to a family that has played a significant role in efforts to reshape economic relations between Israel, the Gulf states and the US - and is right now trying to push through a deeply unpopular multi-billion dollar development in Albania.

Through the Abraham Accords spearheaded by Jared Kushner, investment has flowed between Israel, the United Arab Emirates – which immediately signed the agreements in 2020 – and western markets.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) committed $2bn to Affinity Partners, the private-equity firm established by Jared after he left the White House following Trump’s first term. His stated aim with Affinity Partners was to create an “investment corridor” between Gulf capital and Israeli companies.

It is the same ecosystem of Gulf sovereign capital that Cain operates in. In 2022, the firm jointly invested $900m with Saudi Arabia’s PIF into Aman Group, which operates ultra-high-end hotels, resorts and branded residences around the world. 

And Cain has recently further expanded its Middle Eastern presence. In 2025, it opened an office in Abu Dhabi and formed a partnership with Mubadala Capital, the private-equity and asset-management arm of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund. 

Together they aim to deploy billions of dollars into luxury real estate. Mubadala has become a major global investor and, following the Abraham Accords, has been an important vehicle for Emirati investment into the Israeli technology sector.

The crude logics of speculation and occupation run from the high-rise towers of New York to the desert metropolises of the Gulf, through the Abraham Accords and the “Gaza Riviera” plan, and on to British university cities like Bristol. 

St James House is due to open for the start of the 2028/29 academic year and will stand as a monument to these flows of financial and political capital that sustain Israel’s expansionist impunity. 

But whereas the streets of the old mercantile port were far removed from the agonies of the slave ships, today the bland exteriors of high-rise towers cannot obscure the reality of ethnic cleansing and genocide.