Ambassador Daniel Taub said blaming Israel for the delay in Gaza reconstruction shows ignorance. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Trade between Israel and the U.K. doubled during the four-year tenure of Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub, who will resign this summer, the Israeli Embassy in the United Kingdom announced on Friday.

“The four years since Ambassador Taub took his post have seen Israel-U.K. trade double and a significant deepening of academic, business and cultural links between the two countries,” said a statement released by the Israeli embassy.

British Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills Sajid Javid told an audience at the British Israeli Business Awards earlier this month that total trade between the two countries has entered a “golden era.” Over 300 Israeli businesses have set up operations in the U.K., according to the Israel-Britain Chamber of Commerce, and annual bilateral trade is over $5.5 billion. Javid had put the figure closer to $7 billion.

Taub, who was born in the U.K., became Israeli ambassador in 2011. Once, as a peace negotiator, he traveled to Northern Ireland with his Palestinian counterpart to learn from the situation there.

Many years before Britain’s largest student union voted to adopt a boycott of Israel, Taub said in 2012 during an interview with the Jewish Chronicle that he was “concerned about the atmosphere on some [college] campuses,” warning administrators to make sure “that every view, including those supportive of Israel, can be expressed freely and without fear of intimidation.”

In 2014, Taub defiantly visited Bradford after the city’s representative to parliament, George Galloway , declared the area an “Israel-free zone.”

His successor has yet to be announced.