More Principled than Biden, Australia’s Labor Gov’t Revokes Recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli Capital

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, announced on Monday that the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would reverse the country’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. She said in a statement that Australia’s embassy would remain in Tel Aviv.

She said, “This reverses the Morrison Government’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” She later added, “I regret that Mr Morrison’s decision to play politics resulted in Australia’s shifting position, and the distress these shifts have caused to many people in the Australian community who care deeply about this issue.”

Former PM Scott Morrison, a right-wing leader of the “Liberal” Party (which in Australia means arch-conservative), had violated decades of Australian commitment to the rule of law and a two-state solution. The Australian “Liberals” are obsessed with a supposed immigration threat to Australia and clearly see themselves as settler colonialists who would lose out if the Aboriginals and immigrants gained full rights. Perhaps Morrison and his colleagues sympathized with Israel as another settler colonial state with an unresolved problem of indigenous people. Until the early 1970s Canberra had a policy of “White Australia,” intended to keep out Asian immigrants.

Wong continued, “Today the Government has reaffirmed Australia’s previous and longstanding position that Jerusalem is a final status issue that should be resolved as part of any peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian people.”

What she means by “final status issue” is that Jerusalem is a contested city. It was never awarded to Israel by any international legal authority. Even the unfairly pro-Israel 1947 partition proposal of the UN General Assembly retained international control over Jerusalem. (I call it a “proposal” rather than a “plan” because it was never endorsed by the executive, the UN Security Council, and so lacked the force of law.)

Neither Israeli leaders nor Palestinian ones accepted the partition proposal, although Israel apologists constantly allege that Israel did. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, noted in his diary that Israel had accepted no permanent borders, clearly envisaging that the state would expand beyond both what the UNGA proposed for it and beyond its initial 1947-48 conquests, including the Negev, which had not been included by the UNGA in Israeli territory. During that war, Israeli troops took West Jerusalem, but not the majority-Palestinian East Jerusalem. Then in 1967, after hatching many plots to do so for over a decade, the Israeli army used the chaos of the 1967 war that it launched on Egypt and Syria to seize East Jerusalem as well.

Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem and surrounding areas from the Palestinian West Bank — also not proposed for Israel by the UNGA — which is illegal by dint of the UN Charter, to which Israel is a signatory. As of 1945 you can’t acquire territory from your neighbor by aggressive warfare. The rule was an attempt to forestall war crimes of WW II, such as Mussolini’s annexation of the city of Nice from France. Israel then flooded the illegally annexed area of East Jerusalem and its surroundings with Israeli citizens. That is also illegal, by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1948. The rule was enacted in an attempt to prevent further episodes such as the German attempt to Germanize occupied Poland by flooding it with Germans while expelling Poles during WW II.

In international law, despite the right wing Israeli government’s conviction that Jerusalem will forever be an undivided Israeli city — ignoring the 380,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and environs — Jerusalem’s disposition can only be decided by final status negotiations between Israel and the State of Palestine, to the establishment of which Israel committed itself in the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Israel has a problem with its international legal commitments, ignoring the UN Charter and a raft of UN Security Council resolutions rebuking its attempt to annex a neighbor’s territory, and ignoring the Oslo treaty, to all of which it gave free assent and the signatures of its lawful representatives.

The Labor government in Australia is renewing the country’s commitment to international law in taking this step. Minister Wong said, “The Albanese Government recommits Australia to international efforts in the responsible pursuit of progress towards a just and enduring two-state solution.”

The Albanese government has been more principled than the Biden administration, which has declined to reverse Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. Although the State Department maintains that this move does not change US policy in supporting a two-state solution, it is hard to see it in any other light than as an acquiescence in Israel’s lawless behavior.

The Israelis summoned the Australian ambassador over the decision. But then claim jumpers in the Old West were also upset if the sheriff intervened on the side of the rightful owner of the land.