So this is what a Liz Truss foreign policy, freed from the constraints of EU membership, looks like. She may be unworried – perhaps even pleased – that her consideration of transferring the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has appalled the Palestinians. She should perhaps be more nervous about the impact on Britain’s global standing of a move that would break with an international consensus so far uniquely violated, among leaders of developed democracies, by Donald Trump. Not to mention the position firmly held since the 1967 six-day war by every British government up to and including even Boris Johnson’s.
Perhaps Truss thinks that position merely reflects a similar “orthodoxy” in the Foreign Office to the one she has repeatedly denounced in the Treasury. It doesn’t. The refusal to station an embassy in Jerusalem ahead of a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians is in keeping with international law and every UN resolution over five decades calling for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The latter was annexed, in the world’s view illegally, in the aftermath of that war and earmarked by every European country – hitherto including Britain – for the capital of a future Palestinian state.
