Letter to the Financial Times, 24 October 2022

Your report, “Liz Truss under pressure to drop reckless UK Israel embassy move” (October 13), cites the widespread opposition to moving our embassy to Jerusalem on foreign policy and international law grounds. But there is also a simple truth underneath the rationality and the law. Moving the embassy would be going down Donald Trump’s road of putting right-wing Israeli wishes above Palestinian rights and, more broadly, of setting the principle that all peoples have equal rights under international law at nought.

Donald Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018. That was intended as the first instalment of his self-styled “deal of the century” plan to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan would basically have given America’s carte blanche to Israel to incorporate all of Jerusalem and annex everything it wanted in the West Bank. The Palestinians would have been left with15-20 disconnected enclaves. Even that Palestinian “statehood” was to be contingent on Israeli and US approval. The plan dripped with condescension towards Palestinians.

It was consigned to Washington’s archives after Joe Biden became President but it hasn’t been forgotten. If the Tories persevere with moving our embassy, she will be associating this country with Donald Trump’s plan and his view of the world.

Arthur Goodman,
Parliamentary and Diplomatic Officer

Jews for Justice for Palestinians, London