Lord Levy is Wrong

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His arguments against moving the UK embassy to Jerusalem will aid Israel's foes 

For the full article by Melanie Phillips go to: https://tinyurl.com/yc7kns9y

Anglo jaws collectively dropped to the floor upon reading an opinion    piece in The  Times of Friday 14th October. Lord Levy  is a British Jewish philanthropist and long-standing member of the Labour party, whose stellar fund-raising efforts earned him a peerage bestowed by Labour’s former leader (and Levy’s former tennis partner) Sir Tony Blair. Every single one of Levy’s arguments  are  misguided, ill-judged or flat-out wrong.

1'’The longstanding principle of Jerusalem’s status needing to be determined in a negotiated settlement”. This is a  wilful error. The principle in question was enshrined in the 1947 UN resolution proposing a division of Palestine between an Arab and a Jewish state, and which designated Jerusalem as a corpus separatum to be administered by the UN. Since the entire Partition Plan was rejected by the Arabs, however, it was never implemented and all its proposals were rendered void.

2 “Pouring fuel on the fire is highly irresponsible”. What fire? Despite global predictions of a Middle East conflagration if Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, not only did this not happen but the historic Abraham Accords were signed between Israel and the Gulf states.

3“How does this benefit Britain in the world?” This is shallow and blinkered. Liz Truss has cemented a solid trading and friendship relationship with Israel. Her unambiguous acceptance of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital marks out her government as defying the poisonous anti-Israel consensus among other western countries. Given the importance to Britain of access to Israeli high-tech know-how, intelligence and security links, the proposed embassy move is patently in Britain’s national interest.

4: “All Arab ambassadors, including those representing states that have normalised relations with Israel, have expressed their opposition.” Exactly  the same happened when Trump moved the US embassy, which ignited furious  opposition across the Arab and Muslim world. Two years afterwards came the Abraham Accords.

5 The most egregiously false and incendiary of Levy’s assertions was his suggestion that, by moving the embassy, the UK would be conniving at Israel’s defiance of  “international legality”, “the UN charter”, the “inadmissibility of territorial acquisition” and “annexation by force”.But Israel is guilty of none of these things, which are all canards promulgated by its enemies.The international lawyer 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. Kontorovich wrote “The UN, in its thousands of resolutions to the contrary, flagrantly ignores that principle.”

6 “The heads of the youth movements have strongly denounced the move. They are the future leadership of the Jewish community and should be listened to carefully. “If that is indeed so, then Britain’s Jewish community should be seriously alarmed that its young people are so catastrophically ill-informed about Israel, Jewish history and the Jewish people.

7 “A Trump-style UK relocation would be bad for peace.” But Trump’s relocation of the US embassy was followed by the Abraham Accords, the biggest advance for peace in the Middle East over the past century. Moving the UK embassy would also advance peace by signalling an end to Britain’s shameful century-old capitulation to Palestinian Arab lies and blackmail — a principal source of encouragement for Palestinian Arab rejectionism and violence. By publishing these views in The Times, Levy has in fact spoken for and reinforced Israel’s enemies.

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