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Hysteria Greets UK Prime Minister Truss' Proposed Embassy Move to Jerusalem

(Substack) Melanie Phillips - Prime Minister Liz Truss has said she wants to move the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. When former U.S. President Donald Trump similarly proposed moving the American embassy, critics predicted the outcome of such a move would be Armageddon. The entire Arab world would rise up in fury. The relocation of the embassy would destroy the cause of peace. None of this occurred. Instead, the precise opposite took place. The embassy was moved in May 2018. In September 2020, the historic Abraham Accords were signed between Israel and the Gulf states, a development that did more to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Arabs than anything else in the previous century. Yet Truss' aspiration has provoked similar hysteria in Britain. The foreign policy establishment, along with the usual Israel-bashing suspects, have gone into meltdown, as if the whole experience of the U.S. embassy move never happened. The real reason for the objection is the foreign policy establishment's obsessional and misguided belief that Israel isn't entitled to claim Jerusalem as its capital at all. This is because, in the 1947 Partition Plan, Jerusalem was designated as a corpus separatum under a special international regime to be administered by the UN. But the idea that this status for Jerusalem is currently authoritative is absurd, because the entire Partition Plan was rejected by the Arabs. As international law professor Eugene Kontorovich has written, the key doctrine under international law that determines the borders of a state is uti possidetis juris ("as you possess under law"). According to this principle, Israel's borders at the moment of independence were the borders of Mandatory Palestine - which included all of Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria. He wrote that the Partition Plan, rejected by the Arabs, "was never implemented and did not in fact result in a partition of the Mandate." The only reason this century-old conflict continues is that the Palestinian Arabs have repudiated the two-state solution. They have refused repeated offers of a state of their own, because their goal is not a Palestinian state but the eradication of the Israeli one. Britain and other Western countries have refused to recognize the Palestinians' real agenda, providing them instead with funding, training and diplomatic recognition. In other words, Britain and the rest of the West have incentivized, rewarded and perpetuated the war against Israel. Moving the embassy would be signaling an end to the shameful British capitulation to the Palestinians' lies and blackmail.
2022-10-18 00:00:00
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