{Reposted from the PreOccupied Territory blog}
A country that maintained a globe-spanning empire for more than four hundred years cautioned the Jewish State today against applying its sovereign laws to the Jewish heartland after returning from thousands of years of exile and longing.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared Wednesday that Israel must not risk destabilizing the region by annexing parts of territory taken from nineteen years of Jordanian occupation in 1967, a Jordanian annexation that Britain and Pakistan alone recognized. Johnson warned the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in an official statement. Britain, which held the League of Nations Mandate over the once-Ottoman-held territory that gave rise to the modern state of Israel in 1948, cannot accept that Jews control the land that the League of Nations Mandate specifically assigned to Britain for purposes of establishing a Jewish national home.
British government representatives have sounded a similar tone over the last several months, in response to US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of previous administrations’ objections to Israeli claims on Judea and Samaria. Johnson’s government thus joins the European Union as the most vocal Western opponents of the move, the specifics of which Netanyahu has yet to announce – nor whether the application of Israeli law to parts of the disputed areas will occur at all. Netanyahu’s dithering amid an internal Israeli admixture of apathy and tentative opposition even among his centrist and right-wing allies has emboldened overseas opponents of the move to thwart it with forceful rhetoric. UK and EU opposition, though by no means unified, comes against the backdrop of two thousand years of European and other dominant powers trying to prevent Jewish sovereignty anywhere, let alone the place where Jews and Judaism began.
Australia added its voice against the move Wednesday, as well, with the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison similar words of caution to those of Johnson and the EU. Canberra’s opposition to Jewish reassertion of sovereignty in the indigenous Jewish heartland continues the rich legacy Australia already boasts as a country born of Dutch, then British, colonization, imposing its own agenda on the native population of a land to which it can claim no legitimate rights.
The Western chorus of caution augmented numerous threats from Arab and Muslim governments, who represent societies that colonized the Jewish homeland 1300 years ago and now argue against Jews holding land that Islamic armies rightfully conquered and occupied from previous oppressors of the Jews.