Gaza.

New Foreign Secretary for the UK

William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary for the UK can expect a call from Israel very soon, if not already.  Why?  Well, courtesy of Conservative Friends of Israel, let us find out what Hague thinks of Israel.

“As a longstanding friend of Israel and someone who joined CFI at the age of 15, my position is that there must be a two state solution. It is in the interest of Israel to secure a viable Palestinian State.

A conservative government would not say we should remove the threat of military action. This option should remain on the table. But I’m not calling for it at the moment… The entire issue needs very careful consideration, because it is hard to see how military action even if it was successful in the short term will resolve the problem in the long term… We have to do everything we can to avoid Iran getting a nuclear weapon… It is important to intensify peaceful pressure on Iran.

David Miliband and I differ on the urgency of the Universal Jurisdiction question. He said in December when Tzipi Livni didn’t feel able to visit Britain that it was an urgent matter. Well it was so urgent that we’ve now reached the end of March and there are no government proposals to do anything about it other than an article the Prime Minister wrote in the Daily Telegraph which was really an announcement that they were not going to do anything about it. And one labour MP promoted a Bill to deal with the matter which he knows full well has no chance of being debated let alone being enacted at this stage of the Parliament.

I think we’d have acted more speedily over this and we will be looking to act speedily if we are elected because it is intolerable that Israeli politicians feel they cannot come to Britain to discuss with us all of these issues. So this is one of the main differences between us and the Government.

We also differed over how to vote on the Goldstone Report when it turned out they couldn’t even abstain competently… The motion that went forward was unbalanced as it made no mention of the responsibility of Hamas. We would have voted against it.