Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

When will Britain recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?

In less turbulent times, the disappearance of the Home Secretary would lead the television news bulletins and clear the next morning’s front pages. Yet Sajid Javid went missing on Monday with barely an eyebrow raised.

The former Conservative leadership candidate travelled to Jerusalem and visited the Western Wall, the second-holiest site in Judaism and buttressing the holiest site: the Temple Mount. His pilgrimage to the destination of millennia of Jewish prayers is the first by a UK Cabinet minister in 19 years and especially noteworthy because while there he had, in the eyes of his own government, dropped off the map. 

The UK does not recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and in fact doesn’t recognise it as even being inside Israel. East Jerusalem, runs the UK position, is ‘part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ but the rest of the city is a diplomatic blackspot.

When Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem in 2017, Theresa May said the city’s status ‘should be determined in a negotiated settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Jerusalem should ultimately be the shared capital of the Israeli and Palestinian states’.

This is consistent with the stance of successive Conservative and Labour governments. From the moment he entered Jerusalem until he reached its Old City, the Home Secretary ceased to be in either Israel or ‘the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ and vanished into one of the many holes in British Middle East policy. 

In many ways, Javid’s visit is a positive step forward in UK relations with a reliable ally that we have seldom treated as such. Javid is one of the most senior government ministers and himself a long-standing supporter of the State of Israel, even spending his honeymoon there. That this son of a Pakistani Muslim immigrant is showing leadership after a century of British error on the Jewish return to their ancestral homeland says something encouraging about the country we have become. 

But the Israelis (and the pre-state Zionist movement) have been here before: Javid is not the first British minister to come bearing warm words and if that is all he turns out to be offering, he won’t be the last.

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