An apology and retraction from Emily Thornberry is needed

Emily Thornberry recently made the latest in a series of awkward interventions in the debate about Israel and the Palestinians. Having started in the role of Shadow Foreign Secretary by being carefully balanced, she has increasingly made statements – such as calling for an arms embargo against Israel when it hit Iranian military targets in Syria – that seem designed to either please Jeremy Corbyn or perhaps appeal to Corbynistas in a future Labour leadership contest.

On May 14th, in an LBC interview, she made remarks about Jerusalem that were extraordinary, ill-judged, insensitive, and will appear as partisan to people in the region. Responding to a question about why Eurovision was being held in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem, she said: “Jerusalem should be an international capital of the entire world and it should be something that is run by an international body.”

She went on to add that “we know that the Palestinians claim part of Jerusalem for their state when it is eventually recognised” and that this “doesn’t mean we don’t agree there should be a state of Israel with Tel Aviv as its capital”.

It’s as though Emily’s thoughts on Jerusalem are frozen at the point when Britain bowed out as the colonial mandatory power, when there was a proposal to have Jerusalem as a “corpus separatum” (separated body) as part of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan.

But that proposal, accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Arab leadership in Palestine, died when six Arab armies tried and failed to destroy Israel in the 1948 War of Independence. Jewish West Jerusalem was won for Israel after resisting a bloody siege that was one of the crucial battles of the war.

The major powers may have kept their embassies in Tel Aviv for symbolic purposes until last year’s move by the USA, but the reality is that not only has West Jerusalem been part of Israel for 71 years, the Israeli government and almost every Israeli sees it as their capital.

Emily has been there often. She’s seen that West Jerusalem is where the Knesset is, almost all the ministries, the Supreme Court, the President and Prime Minister’s residences and offices, the Yad Vashem holocaust museum, Har Herzl national cemetery. Is she seriously suggesting that all these institutions be uprooted after 71 years and moved to Tel Aviv? Who is she, or any British or international politician, to tell Israelis where their seat of government should be? We are not the imperial power now and we made a right bodge of it when we were.

She’s seen that Ben Yehuda Street and the Machane Yehuda Market are bustling hubs of Israeli Jewish life. She should know that West Jerusalem residential districts like Rechavia, Nahalot, Mischkenot Sha’ananim and Yemin Moshe are as Israeli as Haifa or Tel Aviv.

Israelis know there are painful negotiations to be had about the status of East Jerusalem, captured in the defensive Six Day War to huge national jubilation, and later annexed to Israel. They know that the international consensus, and the Palestinian demand, is that Israel will need to redivide a city whose reunification was such a moment of joy, so that the East, or at least its Arab-majority districts can be the capital of a new Palestinian state.

They know that imaginative solutions are needed for the “Holy Basin” so that Jews can exercise sovereignty over the Western Wall, their holiest site, whilst Muslims can maintain control of the adjacent Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif.

Jerusalem matters immensely to Jews in Israel and globally in the diaspora. It was their political and religious capital in ancient times. Their hearts yearned for it through 2,000 years of exile. Jews pray “next year in Jerusalem” at Passover. The national liberation movement of the Jewish people, Zionism is named after Zion, an alternative name for Jerusalem. All Jews pray facing Jerusalem.

What Israelis don’t need is theoretical, ill-informed proposals that would deny them any sovereignty in their own capital, that recognise Palestinian claims but not Israeli claims. It isn’t even consistent to say both that it should be internationalised and that it should be the Palestinian capital.

An apology and retraction from Emily is needed if she is to be a credible interlocutor with Israel. A potential Foreign Secretary needs to learn that diplomacy requires sensitivity to and understanding of all sides, not clumsy calls to impose artificial solutions that look a lot too much like the sort of divide-and-rule for which the British Empire was notorious.

Luke Akehurst writes this piece in his capacity as director of We Believe in Israel.