Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sharply admonished Israel for its move to annex the Golan Heights. “I say with the sorrow of a friend that this latest move is harmful to the search for peace” in the Middle East, Thatcher declared in an address Tuesday night to the Board of Deputies of British Jews marking the 220th anniversary of its founding.
Her remarks were otherwise overwhelmingly friendly toward Israel, Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish people generally. Accusing the Soviet Union of renewed repression of its Jewish minority, Thatcher said Britain had conveyed to Moscow “at a high level” its concern about abuses of human rights. “We shall continue to take very suitable opportunity to reiterate that concern,” she said.
Earlier, the Prime Minister paid what she called “a special tribute” to the late Moshe Dayan, the former Foreign Minister of Israel, who she eulogized as “one of Israel’s most brilliant generals and one of her most passionate and imaginative advocates of peace. ” Her remarks were seen as an attempt to make up for the absence of a senior British representative at the funeral of Dayan who died of a heart attack last October.
SUPPORTS EEC STATEMENT
But Thatcher was stern in her reaction to the Golan move which she deplored as a breach of international law and harmful to the search for peace. She endorsed the statement by the Foreign Ministers of the 10 European Economic Community (EEC) member-states, currently chaired by British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, that Israel’s move was “invalid in our eyes.”
All members of the EEC are resolved that Israel should live in security and peace, Thatcher said. “But if we demand these rights for one country and people, we must be prepared to accord them to others, for justice and truth know no boundaries.”
She observed that “The inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by war is enshrined in UN Resolution 242. That same resolution was made the cornerstone of the Camp David accords signed as recently as September, 1978 by Prime Minister Begin for Israel and President Sadat for Egypt and President Carter for the United States. Therefore I say with the sorrow of a friend that this latest move is harmful to the search for peace.” She added that real security would come only from a lasting peace which is “just to Israel, just to her neighbors and just to the Palestinians.”
Responding to Thatcher, Greville Janner, a Labor MP and president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, made no direct reference to Israel’s Golan move but claimed that it was the right of Israel’s democratically elected government to take whatever steps were needed for its citizens’ safety. He described Israel as Britain’s only true ally in the Middle East.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
