So the Foreign Office has issued yet another sternly worded demand, this time over a handful of bulldozed shacks in East Jerusalem. One imagines the permanent secretary, perspiring into his Turnbull & Asser collar, composing the missive with the same righteous fury his predecessors reserved for Muhammad Ali Pasha or the Kaiser. A new low, surely, in the long and wearying pageant of British moral posturing.
Let us first establish what actually transpired. In the neighbourhood of Silwan, a cluster of illegally constructed structures—some little more than breeze-block hovels—were reduced to rubble by Israeli authorities. The owners, naturally, are Palestinians with Israeli residency permits; the land, according to Israeli courts, belongs to Jewish trusts dating to the nineteenth century. And so the ancient quarrel of Jerusalem continues, with each side claiming a prior deed, a longer memory, a more grievous wound.
But the salient point for London is not the legal nuance. It is the opportunity to perform virtue. Britain, which in the last century carved up Palestine with the casual arrogance of a colonial surveyor drawing lines on a napkin, now affects the shocked aunt who discovers the children fighting. The same Britain that armed and sanctioned the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank for nineteen years, who did not utter a peep when Jordan annexed East Jerusalem in 1950, now discovers that demolitions are unconscionable.
Predictably, the Foreign Office calls them ‘illegal under international law’. What an exquisite phrase that is, how it rolls off the tongue of every third-year international relations undergraduate. It implies a clear, universally accepted legal code, when in fact we are dealing with a morass of conflicting conventions, Security Council resolutions that contradict one another, and the small matter that no state actually recognises Jerusalem’s status as settled. The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on the separation barrier? Non-binding. The Fourth Geneva Convention’s application to occupied territory? Disputed. But why let such technicalities spoil a fine parliamentary statement?
The demolitions themselves are ugly, no doubt. Families displaced, possessions crushed, children crying for their lost bedrooms. But let us be honest: the ugliness happens because the conflict itself is ugly, and has been for a century. To single out Israel for this specific practice while ignoring the far more systematic displacements in Syria, Myanmar, or indeed the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, is not morality. It is selective indignation, a cheap substitute for thought.
Moreover, Britain’s own hands are hardly clean. The same government that thunders about Jerusalem demolitions sells arms to Saudi Arabia, which has levelled entire neighbourhoods in Yemen. It subsidises the demolition of council housing in London. It presides over a planning system that routinely denies Gypsies and Travellers permission to place caravans on their own land. The hypocrisy is so thick you could slice it with a Ginsberg knife.
But hypocrisy is the least of it. What truly galls is the assumption that British hectoring will alter Israeli policy. Does anyone in Whitehall seriously believe that Netanyahu, or his successor, will read the Foreign Office note, stroke his chin, and say, “By Jove, they have a point. Let us halt all construction forthwith”? Of course not. The statement is written for domestic consumption: to reassure the Labour backbencher, to mollify the Guardian columnist, to show that Britain still matters in the Middle East. It is theatre. And like all theatre, it is ultimately forgotten when the curtain falls.
The real tragedy is that this cycle of demolition and condemnation distracts from the actual work of peace. Every time a bulldozer moves in, every time a Foreign Office spokesman clears his throat, the possibility of a two-state solution recedes a little more. The houses are rebuilt, the statements are recycled, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem continue to live in a simmering, absurd purgatory.
But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps our leaders prefer the endless repetition of the same tableau to the difficult labour of compromise. After all, a crisis gives one a platform. And a platform, in this age of fleeting attention, is the only thing that still holds value.
Let us put away the stone tablets of outrage. Let us stop pretending that a country which cannot govern its own borders has the right to lecture others. And let us admit, at last, that the only thing being demolished in East Jerusalem is the last shred of British credibility.
