The malicious philanderings of Foreign Office mandarins and the odious way in which parts of the British press handled the resignation of Priti Patel only partially managed to hide the fact the UK-Israel trade relations keep surging ahead.

The core of these growing commercial ties lies in the fact that “more than 300 Israeli companies operate in Britain, with 28 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange worth almost £11 billion.” In fact, Prime Minister Netanyahu was invited to open the trading of the London Stock Exchange earlier this month.

This week’s 35 strong delegation of British business people to Israel is just a further extension of how strongly the two countries are linked to each other. It is estimated that they met 41 entrepreneurs in just 72 hours. Not surprisingly, the UK-Israel Tech Hub is one of those vital elements driving innovation in the British Isles in the past few years.

Also this week, news was revealed of two significant contracts between Israeli companies and the UK. You could say that in spite of those diplomats in the Foreign Office, Britain is to purchase the Sky Sabre System from the Holy Land. The £78 million is designed to protect the strategic Falkland Islands against missile attacks.

And in a different area of commerce, Windward is a Tel Aviv based start up, whose original investors included former CIA director David Petraeus and Dan Senor, coauthor with Saul Singer of “Startup Nation. The company tracks all movements on the high seas of ships. It has signed an agreement with Lloyds of London to create an algorithm predicting levels of danger and suspicious maritime activity. In effect, most of Britian’s sea trade – in fact the vast majority of the world’s maritime trade – will be assessed commercially by a set of Israeli software engineers.

In decades gone past, there was a discussion as to whether Israel was more dependent on the UK in the bilateral relations. Today, the commercial friendship is evidently based on parity. The hateful and spiteful arguments of a few journalists, politicians and BDS supporters have failed to dent this progress.