Boris and Lapid: Could this be the start of a beautiful bromance?

The current assessment in Israel, as the talks between the world powers and Iran finally resumed in Vienna, is that Britain can be trusted in taking a hard line on the conditions for the return to the deal.

After the last cabinet reshuffle in September, when Ms Truss became foreign secretary, there was some concern over the position she would take on the Iranian issue. Only weeks earlier, she had visited Israel for the first time in her previous role as Secretary of State for International Trade. While it had been a successful visit, she had left her Israeli counterparts rather underwhelmed in regard to her knowledge of Middle East diplomacy.

“Truss seems a bit clueless on the key issues,” said one senior Israeli diplomat at the time. “That could be a problem as she’ll be very reliant on her civil servants’ advice and that’s not good news for us.” In the months since, that has turned out to be the opposite of Ms Truss’s attitude. In the conversations she has had with Mr Lapid, over the phone and in person this week, she appears to have boned up on the issues and her positions are by no means being dictated to her by the professional diplomats.

Truss comes up trumps

If anything, Ms Truss has gone further than her predecessor Dominic Raab towards Israel’s positions, not just on the Iranian issue (in her statement after the meeting with Mr Lapid, she said the talks in Vienna were “a last chance” for Iran), but on the Palestinian one as well.

This was evident both in her backing for Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision to designate Hamas’s political wing as a terror organisation – a step that Ms Patel has been pushing for a while, but didn’t happen while Mr Raab was foreign secretary – and in the way the Government played down the Israeli decision last month to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terror organisations. While other Western governments, especially the Americans, asked the Israelis for clarifications, the British line was that it was an internal Israeli decision.

The level of relations right now between the British and Israeli governments is unprecedented. It can be gauged not just from the content of the high-level summits, but also in the warmth of Mr Lapid’s visit this week, as well as the number of his meetings.

He spent just 30 hours in London on Sunday and Monday and in that short time had two meetings with Ms Truss, whom he met before the official “strategic dialogue” at the Foreign Office on Monday morning. He also went for an unreported private dinner on Sunday evening.

The interactions with Mr Johnson weren’t “official” meetings, but part of two events on Monday, the Conservative Friends of Israel lunch and the Chanukah reception at Downing Street, but the two spent a lot of the time at both events speaking with each other. That’s far more face-time than a foreign minister of nearly any other country could expect to have with the PM during a flying visit.

The Lapid-Boris bromance is a sign not just of the current tempo of ties between Jerusalem and London. They’ve known each other since a visit by Mr Johnson to Israel on a CFI delegation in 2004.

Mr Lapid was at the time still a journalist, though many of his contemporaries already believed he was destined for politics. Mr Johnson was a journalist too (editor of the Spectator and columnist at the Daily Telegraph) as well as a Tory backbencher. Small wonder that they’ve stayed in touch ever since.

The attention that Mr Lapid is receiving in his foreign trips (he flew on to Paris on Monday and met French President Macron) is often beyond that which foreign ministers normally get, and is partly also due to the fact that if the coalition sticks together, he will become prime minister in August 2023.

If anything, Mr Lapid’s political future at this moment looks much more certain than that of his friend in Downing Street.

Going viral

Another thing that has brought the Israeli and British governments together is the close coordination and exchange of data in the past couple of years on the Covid-19 pandemic. This continued in recent days as public health officials in the two countries began pooling data, not that there’s a lot of it at this early stage, on the new Omicron variant.

So far, Britain is following in Israel’s footsteps when it comes to using the third “booster” dose of the Covid-19 vaccine and a face-mask mandate, as the main tools against the spread of new variants. But there’s one further step that Israel took this week that is highly unlikely to be followed in Britain.

In what was the most controversial decision of the Bennett government in the six months he has been in office, the cabinet voted to utilise the Shin Bet’s counter-terror surveillance capabilities to track Israeli citizens who have tested positive with the new variant. This isn’t the first time that the Shin Bet has been used for this purpose: the Netanyahu government did it in the first two waves of the pandemic, and it wasn’t that effective at the time.

Four ministers voted against in cabinet. Two of them, Yisrael Beitenu’s Eli Avidar and Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton, are known rebels, especially on matters of Coronavirus restrictions. But they were joined by Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Business Minister Orna Barbivay , who are usually much more consensual cabinent members.

The other went along with Mr Bennett’s rather cavalier attitude towards privacy. When asked whether it wasn’t a problem allowing the security service to track ordinary citizens, one of the ministers who voted in favour said: “I’m not worried. As it is, our locations are constantly being tracked by the tech companies. If anything, I trust the Shin Bet more than I trust Big Tech.”

For now at least, the Bennett government seems to be ignoring its slump in popularity. According to an aggregation of the previous month’s polling, the opposition parties loyal to Benjamin Netanyahu would win five more seats had an election been held now. Not enough to form their own coalition, but very close. Mr Bennett, however, feels that now the budget has been passed, his government is safe.

As if to show how secure he is, five days after he called upon Israelis to not go abroad until more was known about the Omicron variant, his office announced his wife Gilat and their children were flying off on holiday. They did cancel their original plan to fly to Mauritius when it went on the “red list” and travelled instead to another undisclosed overseas location, but still what greater proof can there be of Mr Bennett’s confidence right now.?