BICOM

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he is “proud” of the UK’s role in creating Israel and laid out his vision for peace in an article published today’s Daily Telegraph and the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. 

As the UK prepares to commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration on Thursday, Johnson said the Declaration “was indispensable to the creation of a great nation”. He praised the declaration for its “incontestable moral goal: to provide a persecuted people with a safe and secure homeland,” adding that he “[sees] no contradiction in being a friend of Israel – and a believer in that country’s destiny – while also being deeply moved by the suffering of those affected and dislodged by its birth”.

Johnson added that the UK remained committed to a two-state solution. “The vital caveat in the Balfour Declaration – intended to safeguard other communities – has not been fully realised. I have no doubt that the only viable solution to the conflict resembles the one first set down on paper by another Briton, Lord Peel, in the report of the Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937, and that is the vision of two states for two peoples,” Johnson wrote.

The Foreign Secretary said “there should be two independent and sovereign states: a secure Israel, the homeland for the Jewish people, standing alongside a viable and contiguous Palestinian state, the homeland for the Palestinian people, as envisaged by UN General Assembly Resolution 181”. Johnson said the borders should be based on 1967 lines with an agreed final status of Jerusalem and “equal land swaps to reflect the national, security, and religious interests of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in London later this week and will meet with Prime Minister Theresa May. They are expected to attend an event together to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.