Britain's security adviser pressed Israel not to shut the Jerusalem consulate

Jonathan Powell, Britain's national security adviser, flew to Israel last week to try to stop the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem, three officials told the New York Times. The trip has not, so far, produced a deal. About 30 British diplomats would have to leave if the order stands.

Israel ordered the consulate shut last month after Britain imposed sanctions on West Bank settlements. The consulate, opened in 1839, is the British mission to Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It is separate from the embassy to Israel, which sits in Tel Aviv. Closing it would end the oldest British diplomatic post in the city and remove the channel London uses to speak to Palestinian officials without routing every conversation through the embassy to Israel.

Powell's ask, in a private meeting with senior Israeli officials, was to find a way not to shutter the post. Two of the three officials said he also warned that Britain could expel diplomats from the Israeli embassy in London if the consulate went. In a separate meeting in Ramallah he told Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, that Britain would retaliate in some form if Israel went ahead. All of the officials spoke on condition they not be named, because the conversations were private. The Times published the account on 6 October. No British or Israeli statement has confirmed the expulsion warning in public.

The sanction that triggered the Israeli order is the point of leverage on both sides. Britain has barred some settlers and settlement-linked entities from its financial system, in line with a wider European argument that certain outposts are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel treats those measures as a political act against its claim to the same land, and it has answered diplomatic recognitions and settlement sanctions with steps against consulates and representative offices. The East Jerusalem consulate is a large target. Thirty diplomats is not a token office. It is a political section, a trade section, and the staff who visit Ramallah and Gaza crossings.

A closure would not eject Britain from Israel. The Tel Aviv embassy would remain. What it would remove is the legal fiction, useful to both sides for decades, that Britain can keep a mission in Jerusalem that does not constitute recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the whole city. Britain, like most of its allies, keeps the embassy in Tel Aviv for that reason. The consulate's 1839 founding predates the state of Israel, the 1948 war and the 1967 occupation. Its address is the reason it is exposed now. An office in West Jerusalem under Israeli protocol would be read as a different concession. An office only in Ramallah would abandon the Jerusalem file. Israel has chosen the option that forces the choice.

Powell is not the foreign secretary. He is the national security adviser, which means the trip was meant to be quieter than a ministerial visit and to carry the prime minister's weight without a camera. The fact that it is now in the Times means the quiet channel did not hold. Two officials saying he raised expulsions, and a third confirming the trip but not necessarily that threat, is a split worth keeping. Expelling Israeli diplomats from London would be a public escalation Britain has not used in this dispute. Raising it in a closed room is a negotiating move. Doing it is a cabinet decision that has not been announced.

Abbas, in Ramallah, was told Britain would answer. He was not told how, on the account available. The Palestinian Authority has its own interest in the consulate staying open, because the mission is one of the few Western posts that still treats East Jerusalem as occupied territory in its daily work. If the consulate closes, European missions of the same type will read the precedent. Several of them sit in the same neighbourhoods and rest on the same legal distinction.

What is fixed is the Israeli order, the British sanction that provoked it, Powell's unsuccessful trip, the figure of about 30 diplomats, and the 1839 date. What is not fixed is whether London will expel anyone, and whether a further meeting this week moves the order. Until one of those happens, the consulate is under a closure that a national security adviser could not lift.