Australia Considering Recognizing Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital, Moving Embassy
Scott Morrison Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Australia’s prime minister is considering officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the Australian embassy there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement issued on Monday night in Israel that he had thanked Scott Morrison for his remarks during a phone call.
Morrison also was set to announce that he will reconsider Australia’s support of the Iran nuclear deal and have his country’s United Nations ambassador vote against Palestine becoming the chair of the G77 group of developing nations, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Morrison credited former ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma, as influencing his thinking on the issue of Jerusalem. Sharma is running in a special election on Saturday to fill the Australian House of Representatives seat of Wentworth, left vacant following the resignation of former Prime Minister and incumbent Liberal lawmaker Malcolm Turnbull. Wentworth is home to a significant-sized Jewish community and a Sharma loss in the election means Morrison would lose his one-seat majority in Parliament, leading critics to accuse Morrison of playing politics with the country’s foreign policy.
Morrison, who took office in August, said that by moving the embassy to Jerusalem “we could potentially, should we end up going down that path, be able to advance the two-state solution process. The other one hasn’t been working that well,” the newspaper reported.
On the subject of a government review of the Iran nuclear deal, Morrison said: “These are obviously existential questions for countries like Israel and so I want to be satisfied – it’s been three years now and I think it’s timely to look at those issues and review our position and do that in a fairly systematic way.”
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
