A short history of (African) embassies in Jerusalem
12 November 2020
At a recent meeting between Israeli and Malawi diplomats, an announcement was made that the country would be opening an embassy in Jerusalem. Media reports have suggested that Malawi would be the first African state to make this move after the United States and Guatemala in 2018. This is not strictly true, Africa actually has an established history of diplomatic representation in the city. To understand how, below is a short history of embassies in Jerusalem, especially African ones.
In the 1940s, the international consensus became that the British Mandate of Ottoman Palestine would be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state. These proposals were met with many significant challenges. Key amongst them was the problem of what to do with the holy sites in the area. This was especially important to the Vatican, French, and Italians who were worried about the fate of their historic churches. The solution was to create a separate administrative area known as a Corpus Seperatum. It included both Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and it would belong to neither the Arab nor the Jewish side, and was supposed to be run by the international community.
This approach became core to what is known as the “partition plan”, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The outcome was accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by the Arab states, leading to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. In the process of the war, the eastern side of Jerusalem, including the “Holy Basin” of the old city, was occupied by Jordan, while Israel took up position on the western side of the city. Effectively Corpus Seperatum disappeared as a fact on the ground forever, even though the international community continued to hold onto the notion.
At the end of the war, Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital and moved its government headquarters to the western part of the city under its control. In response, a number of countries began moving their embassies to Jerusalem conducting relations with their Israeli counterparts. The majority were from South America, including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Guatemala. A number were also African, such as Ivory Coast, the then Zaire, and Kenya. Also, on the list were countries such as the Netherlands and Haiti. All in all, at least 16 countries’ embassies were stationed in Jerusalem.
The African embassy moves were also part of an intense Israeli-African diplomatic engagement between 1948 and 1967. Building on links between the early Zionist and Pan-African movements, by 1965, most major Africa leaders had visited Israel. By 1973, Israel had established relations with 32 African states, more than any other country in the world, with the exception of the former European powers. Kwame Nkrumah captured the sentiment of the time when he said, “We understand one another, Jews and Negroes. We were both oppressed for a long time and now we both have our own independent states.”
African embassies in Israel helped facilitate engagements on a vast array of joint projects across the continent including in construction, agriculture, aquaculture, health care, hydrology, youth movements, regional planning, engineering, community services, and many others. John Tettegah, Secretary-General of Ghana’s Trade Union movement, said his visit to Israel had “given me more in eight days than I could obtain from a British university in two years”. Notable projects included setting up an eye clinic in Liberia, and the creation of Ghana’s Black Star Line shipping company.
This situation, however, didn’t last. In 1973, the Arab army invasion of Israel began the Yom Kippur War, in the aftermath these governments continued to ramp up rhetorical pressure and applied an oil boycott of countries with ties to Israel. As a result African states began cutting ties with Israel and removed their embassies from the city.
Contrary to popular belief, the recent moving of the US embassy is not a Trump policy, but actually a holdover from the Clinton era that won the support of 374 – 37 votes in the house and 93 -2 votes in the Senate. It was never fully implemented due to the use by successive administrations of a security waiver, but now that it has been, it has sparked a renewed round of interest in the movement of embassies and trade missions to the city.
Malawi has had relations with Israel since 1964, but never an embassy, so therefore it becomes the first African country of this cycle to make a move in this direction and an indicator where the African governments in general are seeing their relationship with Israel.
Benji Shulman is a broadcaster on Radio 101.9 Chai FM
