Liz Truss, Prime Minister of the UK, and Yair Lapid, Foreign Minister of Israel (Credit: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street)
Threatening to shred international rules and regulations post-Brexit has, alarmingly become the norm for the British government. As so damningly illustrated by the breaching of the Northern Ireland Protocol, an agreement, proposed and signed, under the premiership of Boris Johnson. Or the legislated programme to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda is also facing questionable legitimacy.
Tory Prime Minister, Liz Truss, who earlier this month, was warned against following the example of former US President, Donald Trump, and moving Britain’s Israel embassy to the holy city of Jerusalem, effectively breaking the international status of the holy city for the last 55 years or more. Seeking support to replace Johnson, Truss played to the Israeli gallery by declaring herself a “huge Zionist.”
At a meeting last month on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, she went to the extent of informing her Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, that she was carrying out a “review of the current location of the British Embassy in Israel”.
Truss’s spokesperson confirmed on October 12 that she was intending to move the embassy to Jerusalem. “We haven’t set out a time scale for the move. She has made commitments in the past, she has talked about it in a number of occasions,” the Spokesperson responded to the question of when the embassy move would take place.
Former Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who has announced he was standing for premiership, is also intending to move British Embassy to Jerusalem. According to the Jewish Chronicle, Sunak told an audience of Conservative Friends of Israel that there was a “very strong case” for moving the British Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Since taking office in September, Truss has been under all kinds of pressure about her competence, following her selection with 81,326 votes from Tory members, representing 57 per cent of the total cast, much less than expected.
Her name was put on the ballot sheet after winning the support of 113 Conservative MPs, less than a third of the total.
A Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem was set up under the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted as Resolution 181 in 1947 to end the British mandate. It wasn’t until maverick US President Donald Trump provoked controversy in 2018 when he declared that he was moving the country’s embassy to the holy city.
Only Kosovo, Honduras and Guatemala have since followed suit, while Australia announced this month that it was reversing its decision made four years earlier to recognise west Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
It is difficult to understand why anyone would wish to follow the example of a US president largely seen as an outcast and facing prosecution in his own country. Since Brexit, the Tory government in Britain has become more and more jingoistic, seeking to return to the notorious days of the empire.
It is prepared to sacrifice the country’s reputation globally and proclaim its contempt for other countries. Coming at a time of national support for Ukrainians fending off Russian aggression, Truss’s support of belligerent Israel only exposes the hypocrisy of the policies towards occupying powers.
If the UK wishes to stand up as a beacon of light against injustice, there are more than enough causes to put right before might. Through their unethical risking of the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, the Johnson and Truss governments have already put the pledge to win a new trade agreement on the back burner.
A better policy would be to oppose President Joe Biden instead of allowing Trump’s relocation plans to Jerusalem for the Israeli embassy to remain.
As Labour MP Naz Shah points out, there are “no observable British interests” in following suit. It only confirms how far Britain will go in appeasing aggression and disregard for international laws and norms.
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