The government has dropped a reference to Palestine’s “ambitions for East Jerusalem” from the official Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website in a move seen as an attempt to balance the decision to no longer recognise West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s announcement on Tuesday that Labor would reverse the Morrison government’s recognition of West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was met with fierce opposition from the Coalition, Israel and even MPs within the government.
Victorian MP Josh Burns said he was “disappointed” by the decision and that changes to the policy should have been made “extremely carefully”.
Israel regards Jerusalem as its “eternal and undivided” capital, but Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. In 2018, Scott Morrison announced that along with recognising West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, his government also “acknowledged the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a future state with its capital in East Jerusalem”.
On Friday, that sentence had been deleted from DFAT’s official web page on Palestine.
A spokesman for Senator Wong said the change was made after a “review” of DFAT’s language regarding Israel and Palestine.
“Following the October 18 decision to reaffirm longstanding bipartisan policy that Jerusalem is a final status issue that should be resolved as part of any peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, DFAT was asked to review its website for consistency with current government policy,” he said.
Read the article by Sarah Ison and Jess Malcolm in The Australian.