Israel To Move All Tel Aviv Embassies To Ashkelon

Jerusalem, December 22 – The diplomatic rift between Israel and many other countries over the moribund peace process with the Palestinians widened today when Israel announced that all countries maintaining their embassies outside Israel’s official capital of Jerusalem would be required to move their facilities to the peripheral coastal city of Ashkelon.

Many countries see any Israeli control of “Palestinian” land, including the eastern part of Jerusalem, as illegitimate, though there has never been a sovereign nation of Palestine, and the legitimacy of previous “foreign” rulers of the territory was never challenged. Given Israel’s insistence that Jerusalem remain the country’s undivided capital, many countries refrain from endorsing that claim by keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv instead. Still others maintain the city should not be part of Israel at all, even the western section, and should instead be an international city that is part of no country.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman told reporters the new policy penalizes nations for wholesale rejection of Jewish links to the lands under dispute by forcing them to maintain their offices in the relative backwater city of Ashkelon instead of the country’s economic, social, and cultural hub of Tel Aviv. “If our friends overseas cannot accept that this is Jewish land going back millennia, and recognize that Jerusalem was and always will be at the center of our national life, then they, too, can be relegated to an area outside the area they see as central.”

As a bonus, said Lieberman, delegations in Ashkelon would get to experience firsthand the ordeal of conducting their affairs within range of more Hamas rockets from the Gaza Strip than they do in their cloistered Tel Aviv environs. Additionally, the left-wing activists with whom pro-Palestinian diplomats tend to fraternize are fewer and farther-between in Ashkelon, giving those officials a more palpable experience of what is politically realistic.

It remains unclear whether the new policy would apply to the United States. Congress passed a law in 1995 mandating the transfer of the embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but successive presidents have invoked the executive branch’s prerogative in setting foreign policy to delay the bill’s implementation. Lieberman declined to comment on that question, merely noting that the United States knows what to do under the circumstances.

No country currently maintains an embassy in Jerusalem. The last to move its embassy out of the city was El Salvador, in 2006.

(h/t Irene)