Israel gives Britain 30 days to shut its East Jerusalem consulate

Israel has told Britain to close the consulate in East Jerusalem within 30 days and to accept that the diplomats posted there will lose their accreditation on the same clock. Two Israeli officials and two other people familiar with the instruction described the deadline to Reuters on Wednesday, 9 September. The same sources said British staff attached to a U.S.-led Gaza coordination mission inside Israel, and British diplomats based in Ramallah, have seven days to leave.

The order follows a package announced in London on Tuesday. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the United Kingdom would halt trade in goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. France and Canada said they would do the same. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden endorsed the British step and said they would introduce or consider national measures of their own. That is eleven governments in addition to Britain.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar coordinated the reply with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Saar called the British move morally distorted and a blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and its electoral process. Israel holds a general election in late October. Saar also said Britain would no longer be allowed to train Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, and that twelve British politicians would be barred from entering Israel.

Miliband told BBC television on Wednesday that he regretted the consulate order but was not surprised. He said the government had weighed the costs and benefits of acting and had concluded it could not stand by. He has described violent settler activity in the West Bank as ethnic cleansing carried out with the tacit backing of the Netanyahu government, language Saar labelled outrageous lies.

What the consulate actually does

The mission sits in Sheikh Jarrah and is accredited to the Palestinian Authority. It handles British work on Palestinian issues in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The British ambassador to Israel sits in Tel Aviv. Most governments treat East Jerusalem as occupied since the 1967 war. Israel treats the whole city as its capital under its full sovereignty. Saar repeated that line when he announced the closure: any foreign activity in the area, he said, must run through accepted channels and without violating Israeli sovereignty.

France and Sweden also keep consulates in Jerusalem accredited to the Palestinian Authority. As of Wednesday afternoon Israel had not announced matching steps against Paris, Ottawa or the nine other signatories. Three people familiar with the calendar said the government was due to meet on Wednesday to discuss those files.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said on Tuesday that the British sanctions had been widely expected, but that no one had known the other countries would sign on. The United States has not joined the trade ban. Coverage of Washington's reply has been thin.

A second track of pressure

The trade measures sit on top of a longer quarrel about settlements, settler violence and the two-state map. Britain now regards the occupation of the West Bank as illegal. The eleven-country statement cited settlement expansion and rising settler violence as threats to a two-state outcome. Israel rejects that framing and treats the British package as an attempt to shape its voters weeks before they go to the polls.

The practical effects will be uneven. Settlement goods are a small slice of Israel's export book. The diplomatic effects are larger. Closing the East Jerusalem consulate removes the main British address for Palestinian interlocutors in the city. Pulling trainers out of the West Bank and staff out of the Gaza coordination cell cuts two working channels that London has used since the current war began. The seven-day clock on Ramallah and the Gaza mission is shorter than the 30-day clock on Sheikh Jarrah, which means the field presence shrinks first and the political mission follows.

Netanyahu's office did not answer requests for comment on the 30-day instruction. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had been approached by several outlets for confirmation and had not issued a detailed statement by mid-afternoon in Jerusalem.

The next test is whether Israel applies the same template to France and Canada, and whether any of the nine smaller European states that signed the British text lose access in Jerusalem or the West Bank. Saar has already drawn the line he intends to defend: United Jerusalem, in his words, is the capital of Israel. London has drawn a different line: it will not buy from the settlements and it will keep talking to Palestinians from wherever it is allowed to stand.