British government holds land plot in Jerusalem for future site of embassy in ‘Israel’

Occupied Jerusalem (QNN)- The British government has reportedly held a plot of land in occupied Jerusalem earmarked for decades as a future site of the embassy in ‘Israel’, a revelation that comes following the British Prime Minister’s recent decision to review the embassy’s current location.

Last month, Liz Truss said that she is weighing the relocation of Britain’s Israel embassy in Tel Aviv to the occupied city of Jerusalem – a decision that would follow former US President Donald Trump’s provocative move.

Truss told Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid about the move during a meeting at the United Nations summit in New York City on September 21. She later announced that she had launched a review into the issue.

During her campaign for the leadership of the British Conservative Party, Truss told CFI that she would review the UK’s decision to remain in Tel Aviv if she became the British leader.

“I understand the importance and sensitivity of the location of the British Embassy in Israel. I’ve had many conversations with my good friend Prime Minister Yair Lapid on this topic,” she said.

Middle East Eye (MEE), a london-based online news website, exclusively revealed on Tuesday that the site in the Talpiot neighbourhood, known as the Orange Plot, was retained by the British government as part of a 1960s agreement transferring ownership to the Israeli occupation government of other assets acquired during the Palestinian Mandate.

Under the terms of that deal, the UK government agreed to lease the plot to the Israeli occupation for a sum of £1 a year – with the option to terminate the lease and reclaim the land for its own use at any time.

“The Israelis assume, no doubt, that we wish to use the site in the event of our transferring the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This is, of course, true,” Alan Goodison, a Foreign and Commonwealth Office official wrote in July 1964, according to MEE.

According to Israeli land records uncovered by MEE, the lease was renewed for 40 years in 2007. The records identify the owner of the land as the “Secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.

MEE said it visited the plot this Monday, saying “the area is empty scrubland apart from a few trees, sitting between Hanoch Albek Street and Shmeul Lupo Street in Jerusalem’s southeastern Talpiot neighbourhood.”

“The undeveloped 6,950 square-metre site is in the area of the former Allenby Barracks, a British Army base dating from the Mandate era between 1920 and the creation of Israel in 1948,” MEE wrote.

It is adjacent to a proposed site for a new US embassy which is also on land previously held by the British, and appears to lie partially on the 1949 armistice line, known as the Green Line, separating the 1948-occupied Palestine from the other occupied Palestinian territories of the eastern part of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

MEE’s review of UK government documents held in the National Archives reveals that British officials were discussing potential sites for an embassy to ‘Israel’ on UK-held land in Jerusalem from the 1950s.

In 1965, after more than a decade of negotiations with the Israeli occupation government, the UK government sold the majority of the remaining Allenby Barracks land to the Israeli government for £140,000, according to an agreement signed in London as reported by MEE.

But the UK held onto the “Orange Plot” and, as part of the same agreement, leased the property for £1 annually to ‘Israel’ for 40 years. The lease was backdated to start on 15 May 1948, the day after the British Mandate ended.

Terms of the deal give Britain the option to end the lease agreement and reclaim the land to use for a “non-commercial purpose” at any time.

At that point, the Israeli occupation government must either release the site for the UK government’s use within a year, or provide an alternative site “considered suitable by both parties for the particular use for which it is required”.

While the agreement never mentions an embassy, confidential notes exchanged between Foreign Office officials ahead of its signing make its purpose clear.

Hubert Pullar, the British Consul-General in Jerusalem, wrote in July 1964 to London to ask whether the Israelis, who were then visiting the UK for talks with British officials, “had been given to understand in any way that the [Orange] Plot was being retained as a possible future embassy?”

“I am not sure exactly how well the Israelis understand our intentions vis-a-vis the “Orange” plot, but it is most probable that they have guessed our main object of retaining the site for use in the event of moving the embassy to Jerusalem,” TJ Clark, an FCO official, scribbled by hand on the file containing Pullar’s letter.

“The secondary object – of retaining it for use in the event of Jerusalem becoming internationalised de facto – is presumably not one which they give any thoughts.”

One former British embassy official in ‘Israel’ later described being tasked with visiting the land once a year to maintain the UK government’s right of title, according to an oral history documented by the Churchill Archives Centre.

Timothy Dowse, first secretary and press officer at the embassy in Tel Aviv from 1983 to 1986 recalled, “We had a plot of land in Jerusalem, known as the Orange Plot because it had some orange trees on it, which was reserved for the day when the embassy could move to Jerusalem after a peace settlement. “One of my jobs was to enter upon this land once a year to maintain our right of title to it. There was quite a large file of paperwork on the subject of the Orange Plot.”

MEE said it asked the Foreign Office whether the Orange Plot remains the intended location of a future embassy. The Foreign Office, however, declined to comment, citing Truss’ ongoing review.

Moreover, earlier this month, MEE revealed that a briefing note, sent to pro-Israel Conservative members of parliament and circulated by the London-based Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) lobby group as part of a campaign in support of Truss’s controversial decision, suggests that the relocate of the British embassy from its current location in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be “a bureaucratic one that recognises the reality on the ground”.

The note was sent by James Gurd, the director of CFI, to MPs, setting out the case for Jerusalem along with a “suggested casework response” for MPs to send to constituents.

The briefing note says, “It is understood that the UK government already owns land in west Jerusalem for an embassy to be built there.”

Opposition to Tuss’s decision has grown in recent days.

A spokesperson for the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the senior bishop of the Anglican Church, said he was “concerned about the potential impact of moving the British embassy” to Jerusalem.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the country’s most senior Catholic cleric, said that relocating the embassy would “be seriously damaging to any possibility of lasting peace in the region.”

Christian church leaders in Jerusalem also warned that the British government’s plans would be a “further impediment to advancing the already moribund peace process”.

Muslim leaders in Jerusalem have written to King Charles III condemning the move, noting “we oppose moving the British embassy to Jerusalem since we understand it, as a message to the universe that the UK, in contrary to the international law and the Status Quo, accepts the continuing Israeli illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Israeli unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem and the Israeli illegal Judaisation measures in the Holy City.”

During the Conservative party conference, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the secretary-general of the Arab League, urged British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly to “refrain from taking any illegal action”.

“I take this opportunity to express our concern over the recent statements by Prime Minister Truss on reviewing the location of the UK embassy in Israel,” said Gheit.

Former British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned, in a stark message, Truss from the potential move, telling her “this would be a breach of UN security council resolutions by one of its permanent members, break a longstanding commitment to work for two states for Israelis and Palestinians, and align Britain in foreign affairs with Donald Trump and three small states rather than the whole of the rest of the world.”