Photo Credit: ELNET
Below are the concluding remarks I delivered at ELNET’s eight strategic dialogue between the UK and Israel on 17 September 2024 in Jerusalem.
Eighty-five years ago on that day, the Soviet Union invaded Poland as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Britain had declared war on Germany two weeks before to defend Poland’s sovereignty. The invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia spelled disaster for the Jewish people. Britain was now at war with a country, Nazi Germany, that was bent on eradicating the Jewish people.
But Britain was also preventing Jewish national self-determination in its Palestine mandate. Three months before the war, the British government has adopted the infamous “White Paper” which drastically limited Jewish immigration and land purchase. David Ben-Gurion summarized this paradox when he said: “We must fight with Britain as if there were no White Paper, and we must fight the White Paper as if there were no war.”
Paradox characterizes to that day relations between Britain and Israel.
Britain enabled Palestinian Jews (this is how Israelis were called at the time) to fight alongside the Allies in Italy when it established the Jewish Brigade in 1944. But Britain also maintained the White Paper after the war and continued to prevent Jewish immigration despite the Holocaust. Britain tried to prevent Israel’s independence in 1948, but it fought alongside Israel against Egypt in 1956.
Britain played a key role at the UN Security Council in 1967 to block a resolution that would have demanded a total and unconditional Israeli withdrawal to the armistice lines of 1949. But Britain also added its voice in 1980 to the Venice Declaration, which endorsed the PLO and its demands. Margaret Thatcher imposed a military embargo on Israel while selling tanks to Jordan and military aircraft to Saudi Arabia, but she was also the first British prime minister to pay an official visit to Israel.
The list goes on, and the question is: “What’s the paradox today?”
It is the fact that Britain officially supports Israel’s right to defend itself but undermines that right by suspending military export licenses. Among allies, criticism and frank dialogue are welcome and necessary. Israel is not, and should not, be above criticism. But neither should it be held by impossible standards which NATO forces did not apply to themselves in Iraq and Syria.
Two weeks ago, ELNET hosted a delegation of former senior commanders, most of them from the UK. Among them was General Sir John McColl, former deputy senior allied commander of NATO. He came away from the trip, he said, “satisfied that the IDF’s operations and rules of engagement were rigorous compared to the British Army and our Western allies.”
Israel might be able to do better still to protect civilians while fighting a terrorist organization in urban areas and in underground tunnels. But imposing a partial arms embargo on Israel sends the wrong message to our common enemies: not only to Hamas, but also to the Russia-Iran axis that supports it.
The free world cannot afford to be divided in the current global conflict that has been imposed on us. When our two countries went to war against Egypt in 1956, tensions between the US and the UK played into the hands of the Soviets. Let us not repeat that mistake and let us settle our differences in private.
Abba Eban wrote the following about British politics: “It became a Zionist truism that our friends were former minsters, while incumbent ministers were our former friends.” May this dialogue, and the work of ELNET in general, relegate this truism to history.