Why won’t the UK recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital?

The opening of talks on a UK-Israel free-trade agreement (FTA) is a welcome development for both countries. The negotiations, launched by Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan in a meeting with Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely on Wednesday, follow a bilateral roadmap on cyber, tech and defence drawn up last year. As it stands, UK-Israel trade is worth £5 billion annually and 6,600 British firms sell to the Middle Eastern nation. The objective of the FTA would be to reduce commercial barriers further.

Strengthening trade ties is of mutual benefit. More than 7,000 Brits are employed by Israeli-owned UK businesses and Israel is a key export market for London, the northwest and Scotland, who between them sell roughly half a billion worth of goods to the Jewish state every year. For its part, Israel, which already enjoys UK foreign direct investment to the tune of £1 billion, will be able to meet the growing needs of its import markets.

This is undoubtedly good news. Hi-tech and halvah all around. But as the UK steps up its trading relationship with Israel, our diplomatic and political positions grow staler. Nowhere is this starker than on the status of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The Israelis have controlled it partially since the 1948 war of independence and fully since 1967, when they liberated the Old City and eastern Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any independent, sovereign state or comparable entity other than a Jewish one, be that the Kingdom of Israel or the modern state. Under Israeli law, Jerusalem ‘complete and united’ is ‘the capital of Israel’, a position affirmed by the United States and a number of other countries.

But not the UK, where the government recognises only ‘Israel’s “de facto authority” over West Jerusalem’, which is as slippery as all lawyer talk is. As recently as 2016, Foreign Office briefing documents were still referring to Jerusalem as corpus separatum. (You know your foreign policy has really kept up with the times when it requires a working knowledge of Latin.) Jerusalem was designated a corpus separatum in the 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly, accepted by the Jews, and rejected by the Arabs, who went on to launch a war for ‘the elimination of the Jewish state’. You can see why the Foreign Office would consider this a totally reasonable and unproblematic basis for UK policy on the Middle East.

Originally, corpus separatum meant Jerusalem would be run by the United Nations. These days Israel wouldn’t trust the UN to run a shawarma stand, and rightly so. So corpus separatum, as used by the UK government, has come to mean split sovereignty in Jerusalem, with Israel controlling the western parts of the city and a future State of Palestine the eastern portions. Curiously enough, the government only seems to like parts of the doctrine. Somewhere along the way, the part of the 1947 plan that said corpus separatum could be put to a referendum of Jerusalem residents after ten years has fallen by the wayside.

The result of all this ancient history and failed diplomatic dogma is that the UK must maintain the fiction that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel. That the Palestinian Authority has a comparably strong claim to a city which has never been part of any Palestinian state, since none has ever existed. That re-dividing the city is the way to deliver peace and uphold religious freedom, when Israeli control is the closest Jerusalem has come to underwriting religious co-existence. That splitting a capital city between recently hostile nations is a viable policy, or one with any successful precedent in the contemporary world. That by keeping up these pretences the UK is hastening the arrival of a two-state solution rather than delaying it by pandering to and rewarding Palestinian rejectionism.

The UK’s policy on Jerusalem has failed. It is not a prerequisite to peace but a hindrance, a well-intentioned bit of imperial fixing and post-imperial guilt which has calcified into catechism. The UK’s policy does not recognise Jerusalem because recognising Jerusalem is not the UK’s policy. There is no rationale beyond that.

The signing of an FTA would be a prime opportunity to reset British policy on Israel. It would give the next prime minister a chance to break with the impotence and ineffectuality of the past. The lobby for the past – Foreign Office civil servants and diplomats – would be furious. No wonder: for once they would be implementing government policy on the Middle East rather than deciding it. All the same, a bit a ministerial bravery would be worth it.

If we are going to enhance our trade with Israel, we should afford it the dignity and respect of recognising its capital city. Israel does not dispute Westminster sovereignty over Scotland or Northern Ireland and Westminster should treat Israel in kind. Recognising Jerusalem would not prevent us from objecting to Israel’s rule over Judea and Samaria, over which Israel itself does not assert de jure sovereignty, or any aspects of that rule. Nor would it foreclose on territorial changes in any part of Jerusalem in future talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has demonstrated time and again its willingness to cede territory in pursuit of peace (e.g. Sinai, Hebron, Gaza). It takes a certain Whitehall arrogance to think British recognition of Jerusalem would discourage the Palestinians from their national struggle or Israel from a land-for-peace policy it has followed for four decades.

Recognition is not about pre-empting final status arrangements, imposing British preferences, or inserting ourselves in a far-off conflict. It is about recognising facts on the ground. As the United States said when it moved its embassy to Jerusalem, the decision was about ‘principled realism, which begins with an honest acknowledgment of plain facts’. Similar realism, principled or otherwise, has been shown by Taiwan, Nauru, Honduras, Guatemala, and Kosovo, as well as Russia and Australia, which have both recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The UK should recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, quaint though this may sound, because it is the truth and, where possible, our policy should be based in truth, or at least not based in harmful, unproductive fictions like corpus separatum. The UK should re-designate its unaccredited Jerusalem consulate as its embassy to Israel. It should do so as a sign of good will to a friendly nation which shares intelligence that helps us break up London terror plots and whose pharmaceutical giant Teva supplies one in every six medicines prescribed in the UK. We should recognise Jerusalem because negotiating a trade deal with a country while pretending it doesn’t have a capital city is as cowardly as it is absurd.