60 Former British Ambassadors Demand Action on Israel
Over 80 former British diplomats, including 60 ambassadors, high commissioners and senior officials, have written to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper saying Israel’s expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories amounts to “accelerating annexation” and that words of condemnation are being ignored. The letter was published in the Financial Times on Friday. It demands three concrete actions: warnings to any company bidding on the E1 settlement project near Nablus, a comprehensive ban on UK trade with Israeli settlements, and the suspension of trade concessions for breaches of the human rights provisions in the UK-Israel trade agreement.
The signatories include former UK ambassadors to the United Nations, the United States, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and most other states in the region. Their position is the position of the International Court of Justice, which the British regime nominally accepts.
To be entirely honest, there is very little hope the letter will be acted on. Britain is already a party to the campaign the letter asks it to disrupt.
Since December 2023, the Royal Air Force has flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza. The sorties launch from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, using Shadow R1 spy planes and, more recently, Beechcraft aircraft contracted from Straight Flight Nevada Commercial Leasing LLC, a subsidiary of America’s Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Ministry of Defence insists the missions are solely for hostage rescue. In the fortnight before Israel’s 8 June 2024 raid on Nuseirat refugee camp, which killed more than 270 Palestinians, the RAF flew 24 of them. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights later concluded the raid may amount to a war crime. The flights continued through ceasefires the Israeli regime broke hundreds of times. When MPs have asked what the flights are seeing — including whether they recorded evidence of mass graves at Gaza’s hospitals — the regime has refused to say. The Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office will not confirm whether any oversight exists at all.
A regime providing daily intelligence support to the Israeli military is not a regime that will suspend trade with it for human rights violations. The letter’s value is not the response it will receive. It is the record it creates: 60 of Britain’s own former ambassadors stating, in advance, that the law required action, and that the regime chose complicity instead.