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Why Britain's Eastern Jerusalem Consulate Had to Go
(Times of Israel) Shlomo Kates - When news broke that Israel would be closing the British Consulate in eastern Jerusalem in response to the UK's recent sanctions, to me, this decision was long overdue. The consulate's very existence was built on a diplomatic fiction and Israel has finally chosen to stop indulging it. During my time as head of communications at the British embassy in Tel Aviv in 2023, I was responsible for communicating the UK's official policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The core message was: peace can only be achieved when Israel retreats to the pre-1967 lines, with Jerusalem as a shared capital. But I never believed it. It was a mantra from another era, disconnected from the lived reality of Jerusalem and the political landscape that has evolved over decades. The eastern Jerusalem consulate existed to serve Palestinians exclusively, even though it sat squarely inside the Jerusalem municipality under full Israeli control. It wasn't designed to serve everyone in its geographic area. It wasn't even located in a place that made practical sense. Meanwhile, Jewish residents of eastern Jerusalem were told to go to Tel Aviv for consular services. The consulate was a political symbol, a relic of the UK's insistence on treating Jerusalem as a divided city even though it hasn't functioned that way since 1967. Israel's decision to close the consulate is a correction. A sovereign state has every right to decide which foreign missions operate within its capital. Closing the consulate doesn't undermine peace; it undermines a fantasy.