Free elections set to take place in Egypt may turn ugly for Israel unless the peace process is resumed, UK ambassador Matthew Gould warned on Thursday morning.
Speaking to Israeli press at the British ambassador’s residence in Ramat Gan, he said Egyptian politicians might try to outdo each other with rhetoric critical of the Jewish state to gain voters.
“If the peace process continues to be completely stuck as neighboring countries go into elections to determine their new political shape those elections will effectively become auctions for who could be more critical of Israel and I think that’s extremely dangerous,” Gould said. “As someone representative of a country that really cares about Israel’s security and position in the region the last thing we want to see is elections in the region turning into who-could-be-more-critical-of-Israel competitions. The way to avoid that is to have progress with the talks.”
Gould said that the next six months would be pivotal to the prospects of resurrecting talks between Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority which have been stalled for over two years.
“September is going to be extremely difficult because you have the deadline that Obama set out for UN representation for the Palestinians,” he said. “If there is no progress by then we’ll be in trouble.”
Like in all previous press conferences the 39-year-old diplomat has held since he assumed his position six months ago, the UK's treatment of Israel in the wake of the mysterious assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai last year came up.
Back in March of last year the British government expelled Israel’s military attaché to protest the alleged use of forged British passports by Israeli agents said to have carried out the killing. Last week, however, several British troops were reportedly caught in Libya in possession of four forged foreign passports each.
Gould rejected the notion that the UK’s response towards Israel was hypocritical, saying it had decided to take punitive measures against it because its explicit requests were ignored by the Mossad, Israel's spy service.
“As the foreign secretary said, it was not on the basis of suspicion,” Gould said. “It came following several requests that British passports not be used in that way.”
He said he was not at liberty to discuss recent secret operations in Libya or whether it was common practice by British security services to forge foreign passports.
Immediately after the press conference ended Gould accepted a ketuba-like parchment made by scribe Israeli-Briton Michael Horton on behalf of Prince William and Kate Middleton on the occasion of their royal wedding.
Gould, who is Jewish, said the scroll written in Hebrew and English would reach Britain through the diplomatic mail ahead of the marriage set to take place in April.
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