Britain should follow US President Donald Trump’s lead and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the Jewish state’s UK envoy wrote in a Telegraph op-ed published on Sunday.
“In contrast to much of the perceived wisdom surrounding this issue, such a move would be both just and good for peace,” Ambassador Mark Regev asserted.
Trump’s Jerusalem policy shift, in Regev’s view, will help “advance peace by eroding the dangerous fantasy that the Jews can somehow be wrested from Jerusalem, and that we have neither a valid claim to the city, nor a right to a capital there. This is precisely the type of extremist thinking that renders peacemaking all but impossible.”
Furthermore, Regev pointed out, “[i]t is an accepted norm in international relations that every sovereign state has the right to decide its own capital city. Even when some countries have changed their capital — as did Turkey in 1923, China in 1949, Brazil in 1960 and Germany in 1999 — this norm has been upheld, and embassies have been relocated accordingly. Only in the case of the Jewish state has this norm not been applied.”