Former British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned, in a stark message, new British Prime Minister Liz Truss from the potential move of the country’s embassy in ‘Israel’ to Jerusalem, saying this would “align” her government with Donald Trump.
Stepping into the controversy of whether to move the UK’s Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Hague, who is also a former Conservative Party leader, wrote in The Times newspaper on Monday, “Do not move the British embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”
Hague told Truss, “This would be a breach of UN security council resolutions by one of its permanent members, break a longstanding commitment to work for two states for Israelis and Palestinians, and align Britain in foreign affairs with Donald Trump and three small states rather than the whole of the rest of the world.”
The warning from Hague, now a member of the House of Lords, was part of a list of measures that he said the government must take immediately “to stop making matters worse”.
Hague was the Conservative leader in opposition from 1997 until 2001 and served as foreign secretary between 2010 and 2015 in David Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Opposition to the possible move has grown in the recent days with Christians and Muslim leaders in Jerusalem and Britain warning against the move.
On Monday, Christian church leaders from 13 religious denominations in Jerusalem stated that such a move would be a “further impediment to advancing the already moribund peace process”.
A spokesperson for the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the senior bishop of the Anglican Church, last week said he was “concerned about the potential impact of moving the British embassy” to Jerusalem.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the country’s most senior Catholic cleric, said on Thursday that relocating the embassy would “be seriously damaging to any possibility of lasting peace in the region.”
The UK’s Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National parties reportedly opposed moving the British embassy, stressing this “would be a provocation.”
Addressed to Britain’s new monarch and written by leaders of the Islamic Waqf, a Palestinian-Jordanian body that runs the affairs of al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, and the current and former grand muftis of Jerusalem and Palestine, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein and Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, respectively, condemned the potential relocation, saying the move undermined a two-state solution and would inflame religious conflict in an “already unstable situation in Jerusalem”.
