Britain’s new Israel ambassador sets out stall in first public appearance

Britain’s newly-appointed ambassador to Israel, Simon Walters, received a warm welcome from an audience of National Jewish Assembly and Finchley Synagogue members on Tuesday evening.

It was the ambassador-designate’s first public appearance since being named as Neil Wigan’s successor in January: since then the Northern Irish-born diplomat has been deeply immersed in studying Hebrew, and is due to fly to Tel Aviv in two weeks’ time.

Interviewed by UK Lawyers for Israel’s Natasha Hausdorff, Mr Walters covered a wide range of subjects relating to his impending role. He said that being brought up in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles had given him a keen awareness of the dangers of sectarianism.

And he revealed that there was also an early kinship with Israel and the Jewish community in his family: his mother had volunteered on kibbutz during the 1960s, while a four-year relocation to New York between the ages of nine and 13, due to his father’s job, meant that almost all his friends were Jewish and that he had attended “any number of bar mitzvahs.”

The diplomat has already served in Israel as Consul in Jerusalem between 2008 and 2011 and spoke affectionately of his time there, during which his younger son was born in Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital.

Mr Walters praised the strategic relationship between Britain and Israel and the importance of the trade relationship between the two countries, which he hoped to built upon in Tel Aviv. “It will be a priority. Did you realise that 15 per cent of all NHS drugs are produced by [Israel’s] Teva Pharmaceuticals?”

A Middle East specialist who has most recently served as the Foreign Office’s director of national security for the region, Mr Walters said Britain and Israel had worked closely together on counterterrorism issues, and praised Israel for its “unsung role” in the defeat of Daesh, or Isis.

He also referred to the new agreement signed between Israel’s Eli Cohen and Foreign Secretary James Cleverly in January this year, one aspect of which will allow professional qualifications to be recognised in both countries.

But the ambassador-designate found less favour with his audience, when he told a questioner asking about the two-state solution, who claimed that it had been rejected “by Israelis and Palestinians”, that his “hackles rose” when he heard people being referred to in such generalised terms. “I think it is divisive to talk about people in categories”, Mr Walters said, gently insisting that not all Israelis and not all Palestinians felt that way.

Britain, he said, maintained its position that the two-state solution “remains the only practical solution”, and its government would continue to support that.

The diplomat was also asked several times about perceived bias in the Foreign Office and the BBC. Deploying considerable charm, he insisted that even if there had been anti-Israel prejudice in the foreign service once upon a time, that was no longer the case.

As for the BBC, he said, it had an independent editorial policy and questions on that should be addressed to the BBC.

He said that Britain was “hugely supportive” of the Abraham Accords and believed that there were “intensive efforts” to add to the number of countries signed up to them. And he made it clear, additionally, that Britain regarded Iran as a serious threat in the region and said that sanctions against Iranian-backed proxies were kept “under regular review”.

Mr Walters and Ms Hausdorff were introduced by the National Jewish Assembly’s Gary Mond and thanked by its vice-chair, Keith Rowe.