Letter to British Ambassador in Israel Mr. Simon Walters

Today, Hikmah - Center for International Law and Human Rights sent a letter to the British Ambassador in Israel Mr. Simon Walters. Here is its text:

31 January 2025

Mr. Simon Walters

His Majesty’s Ambassador to the State of Israel

British Embassy

192 Hayarkon Street

6340502 Tel Aviv

Israel

Dear Sir,

Re: Your Participation in INSS’s Conference

According to the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), you intend to participate in its international annual conference scheduled for 25 February 2025. From the conference’s plan, it is hard to detect any other meaningful international participant.

INSS is a Tel – Aviv University affiliate organization dedicated to bolstering Israel’s security and diplomatic stature. Many Tel-Aviv University graduates join the Israeli Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency renowned for its diabolical violations of international law. Faculty from the university serve as information providers in the nearby building at Glilot. Another participant in the conference is Mossad’s former head Yossi Cohen who threatened and tried to extort former International Criminal Court prosecutor Ms. Fatou Bensuda over her investigation of Israel’s notorious violations of basic international norms. The affair was reported in The Guardian.[1] 

Unfortunate but unsurprising the British ambassador’s participation in this conference is contrary to the spirit of the London demonstrations against Israel’s genocide and a continuation of the British government’s complicity in it committed in occupied and enclaved Gaza. Together with its superior G7 ally the United States and its Israel lobby interference, the British government participated in the excessive supply of weapons to Israel, opposed ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations Security Council, undermined the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over Israel’s actions diplomatically and legally, opposed South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice against Israel’s perpetration of genocide, and joined the United States military to combat Yemen’s humanitarian intervention at the Red Sea.

Even in ordinary times, your participation in such a conference defies logic. A colonial and apartheid state, Israel's international standing should be at the end of sanction receiving and delegitimization until Palestinian rights are adhered to and an alternative political entity is generated based on justice, the rule of law, and equal rights that terminates Zionism and its sovereignty in Palestine.

As a career diplomat, it is not expected that you heed to basic human decency and international law that do not coincide with your government’s interests. In the Middle East, they are the protection of oil-rich countries and close cooperation with Israel’s intelligence agencies that date back further than the 1956 tripartite aggression against Egypt.

The British government’s lack of respect for Palestinians’ rights has a long detrimental history. While the abstention regarding the unjustified 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution partitioning of Palestine may have been affected by Zionist terrorism against British facilities in Mandatory Palestine, a conduct that has been consistent regionally ever since, the 1917 colonial Balfour Declaration that laid the international foundation for Zionist sovereignty in Palestine when that community formed less than 10% of the population remains unforgivable. British authorities’ crushing of Palestinian revolt against their rule in Palestine (1936 – 1939) was colonialism’s ordinary teachings.

Hostility to Palestinian rights has a stronghold in British society as well that contrary to the Irish one, is predominantly and consistently anti – Palestinian informed by the influence of dominant British Jewish organizations and individuals that produced the pro-Israel axis of Blair / Starmer.

Britain has never been a friend of Palestine. It is unlikely that it will change in the foreseeable future.

Respectfully,

Marwan Dalal

Executive Director  

British Ambassador Simon Walters

[1] Harry Davies, “Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry”, The Guardian, 28 May 2024.