ISRAEL’S NEW AND INTRIGUING AMBASSADOR FROM THE UK….MATTHEW GOULD….SEE NOTE PLEASE
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Editor’s Notes: A most intriguing ambassador
A MOST INTRIGUING AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL
By DAVID HOROVITZ
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=191460
Please also read about Herbert Lewis Samuel, the Jewish High Commissioner for Palestine who arrived to rapturous praise and joy in June 1920. The Jews hailed his arrival thinking it affirmation that the Brits were committed to their promise of a homeland to the Jews. He served for five years during which time the Brits betrayed the Jews and deeded 82% of Palestine to the Hashemites sho had not a shred of legal or historical claim to the region now known as Jordan and ruled by Kinglet Abdullard, son of the smarter King Hussein.
Samuel had had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, and although he subsequently ceased practicing, he remained intensely interested in Jewish communal problems.
Samuel’s career in different British posts was unique in its scope; he was the first unconverted Jew to serve in a Cabinet office.
Excerpts from the interview are at the website.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=191460
Matthew Gould, Britain’s first Jewish ambassador to Israel, has no hesitation in
acknowledging ‘my love of Israel’ in an interview.
Matthew Gould says he hasn’t counted how many ambassadors Britain has appointed
to the modern state of Israel, but estimates it “must be in the low teens.” Of
these envoys, he is likely one of the youngest – not yet having turned 40 – but
far more intriguingly, he is certainly the first who is Jewish.
And Gould is not incidentally Jewish, or awkwardly Jewish, as seems so often to
be the case with British Jews who rise high in politics and diplomacy. He is
passionately and comfortably Jewish.
For me, an ex-British Jew a few years older, discussing his childhood and
background over coffee last week made for a conversation in which plenty of his
experiences resonated with mine.
Gould is charming and reasonably candid – choosing to vouchsafe a dramatic,
defining incident from his family’s past. He was, in fact, as candid as a newly
appointed, unprecedentedly Jewish ambassador to that problematic State of Israel
could possibly be expected to be in an interview with the editor of a newspaper
whose editorial line on blame and possibilities in the peace process often
differs quite significantly from that of the British Foreign Office.
Meeting him less than two months after I had interviewed his departing
predecessor Sir Tom Phillips, it was impossible not to be struck by the
similarity of some of their answers on those British policies, and by the
contrast this constituted with Israeli norms. Whereas our prime minister and his
foreign minister, to take the most glaring example, often set out two entirely
conflicting world views, the outgoing and the incoming British envoy, no matter
how different their backgrounds, plainly read from the very same diplomatic rule
book. Questions as to whether Gould’s Jewish heritage might have engendered a
more forgiving attitude than Phillips had displayed toward Israeli claims in
Judea and Samaria, for instance, were swiftly and efficiently dispatched.
Still Phillips, self-evidently, could not have made this kind of comment: “I do
think that one of the things that being Jewish and having my background gives me
is an appreciation of what security means to the Israeli people, to the Jewish
people… From a very young age I was taught about the struggle for
independence, the Six Days War and so on. I think I can say I have a more
visceral understanding of what security means, and what craving for security
means.”
The new ambassador, who was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British
Empire) at the precocious age of 26 for his role in arranging the Blair
government’s London Conference on Nazi Gold in December 1997, is razor-sharp,
confident, extroverted and disarming – a highly potent combination. It lies at
the heart of his career success, which has notably included an effective stint
as deputy head of mission for Britain in Teheran. There too, true to form, he
made no secret of his Jewishness, went to shul, and had no hesitation in
intervening on behalf of the Jewish community and other minority communities
when appropriate.
Although Israel “loomed large in my childhood,” Gould does not presume to know
the country inside out. Far from it. He spoke to British Jews and British
Muslims at length about this region before coming here. And he intends to speak
to Israeli Jews and Arabs, and anybody else, as he shapes his thinking now that
he’s arrived.
“My most important task here is not to come and wag a finger and tell the
Israelis what the answers are,” he says at one point.
“The single most important thing I can do here is to listen – and to listen not
just to the people who agree with British policy, but to go round the country
and talk to the Right and the Left. Talk to settlers. Talk to Israeli Arabs.
Talk to the religious and secular.
And really get a sense for myself of where Israeli thinking is, and where the
divides are in Israeli society, and what motivates people, and what their fears
are, and what their worries are. I need to spend the next few months doing that.
And that’s what I’m going to do.”
His earnest, affable appeal is such, I suspect, that his Israeli protagonists
will pour out their hearts to Gould, this tantalizing appointee who is both one
of our own and one of them.
His appointment, as he rightly asserts, “sends a nice signal about the maturity
and place of the Jewish community in the UK.” But it should not be
misinterpreted: “At the end of the day,” as he takes pains to stress, “I’m here
as the British ambassador, not the Jewish ambassador.”
Excerpts:
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