Why do embassies avoid Jerusalem?

Because for seventy years the world treated Israel’s capital as a question rather than a fact. Jerusalem has housed Israel’s parliament, supreme court, prime minister’s office and president’s residence since 1949, and until 2018 almost every country in the world kept its embassy in Tel Aviv, an arrangement applied to no other capital city on earth. The United States recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017 and moved its embassy there on 14 May 2018, the seventieth anniversary of Israel’s independence. Guatemala followed four days later, and Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Fiji have since opened embassies or offices in the city.

The fact the arrangement was built to avoid

Israel’s government has sat in Jerusalem continuously since 1949. The Knesset meets there. The Supreme Court sits there. The prime minister and the president live and work there. A foreign ambassador accredited to Israel presents credentials in Jerusalem and then drives back to an office in another city.

No comparable practice exists anywhere else. States that dispute a border do not usually respond by refusing to acknowledge where the other country’s parliament physically is. The Tel Aviv convention was not a judgement about municipal boundaries or about the status of neighbourhoods captured in 1967. It was a refusal to concede the plainest available fact about Israel: where its government sits.

What 1947 actually said, and what happened to it

The standard legal argument for the old arrangement runs through UN Resolution 181, which proposed that Jerusalem become a corpus separatum, an internationally administered zone belonging to neither state. It is the strongest version of the case and it deserves a straight answer.

Resolution 181 was a recommendation of the General Assembly, not a binding instrument, and it was a package: a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international city. The Jewish leadership accepted it. The Arab League and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected all three parts and went to war to prevent any of it. The international city never came into existence for a single day. What happened instead is that Jordan seized the eastern half of the city in 1948, expelled its Jewish inhabitants, destroyed or desecrated the Jewish Quarter’s synagogues and the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and barred Jews from the Western Wall for nineteen years, in violation of the armistice agreement it had signed. Almost no state recognised that annexation. Yet the plan the Arab side destroyed by force in 1948 continued to be cited, for seven decades, as the reason Israel could not be said to have a capital.

Jerusalem was a Jewish city long before it was a diplomatic problem

The city has had a Jewish majority since at least the 1860s, well before political Zionism, the Mandate, or the state. It is the subject of three thousand years of Jewish liturgy, the direction of Jewish prayer, and the site of the two Temples; the archaeological record of Israelite and Judahite Jerusalem, from the City of David through the Second Temple period, is not seriously contested by anyone working in the field. Recognising a Jewish capital in Jerusalem does not create a claim. It acknowledges the oldest continuous one in the city.

The warning that did not come true

When the American recognition was announced in December 2017, the predictions were uniform and severe: it would ignite the region, end any prospect of negotiations, and produce mass violence. The UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to declare the decision null and void. Turkey’s president called for the recognition to be reversed and convened an emergency Islamic summit. Palestinian factions announced days of rage.

The region did not ignite. Within two years the Abraham Accords normalised Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, the first Arab-Israeli normalisations in a quarter century, and they happened after the embassy move rather than being prevented by it. The forecast that acknowledging where Israel’s parliament sits would detonate the Middle East was not a prediction. It was a bargaining position, and it was tested in public and failed.

What the seventy years were really about

Strip away the legal apparatus and the practice communicated one thing: that Israel’s permanence was still negotiable in a way no other state’s is. Embassies do not sit in a country’s second city because the capital’s status is complicated. They sit there when the host state’s legitimacy is being held at arm’s length. That is why the move mattered out of all proportion to the logistics of relocating an office, and why the countries that followed the United States were making a statement about Israel’s normality rather than about Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries.

Related pages

Is Hebron a Jewish city or a Palestinian city? · UN Resolution 181: the Partition Plan (1947) · The Abraham Accords (2020) · Was Jerusalem always an Arab city? · Jerusalem and the Temple Mount · Israel and the UN

Sources

• UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 29 November 1947, full text.
• Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, 3 April 1949, Article VIII, on access to the holy places, and the record of its non-implementation.
• US Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-45) and the presidential proclamation of 6 December 2017.
• UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/19, 21 December 2017.
• The Abraham Accords Declaration and bilateral normalisation agreements, September 2020 onward.