When Liz Truss’s premiership came to an abrupt end, it appeared to spell doom for a historic policy shift raised in her leadership campaign. In a break from a widely held but diplomatically fruitless consensus, Truss stood on a platform of reviewing the location of the British embassy in Israel.

That legation is still based in Tel Aviv despite Israel proclaiming Jerusalem its capital in December 1949 and placing its parliament, government and Supreme Court there. Successive UK governments have deemed Jerusalem a ‘corpus separatum’ and withheld recognition, noting only Israel’s ‘de facto’ authority over the western portions. This is despite Israel exercising all the functions of a sovereign in Jerusalem.

Israel’s liberation of the eastern sections of the city in 1967, and application of its laws to a ‘complete and united’ Jerusalem in 1980, represented a historic national achievement for the Jewish people. It has also underwritten religious liberty in a city also cherished by Christians and Muslims.

Under Jordanian occupation, Jews were expelled from eastern Jerusalem and their synagogues burned, but under Israeli authority there are provisions to facilitate freedom of worship. This set-up is not particularly loveable. Jews are banned from praying on Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, while Muslims are free to pray there. There are tensions. Clashes are not unknown. But on the whole it works.

The UK’s policy, one shared by the overwhelming majority of countries, is to deny recognition to this uneasy but enduring arrangement. We pretend that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel because we fear doing otherwise would concede that international law, or at least the dominant reading of it, has failed as a conceptual framework in the most scrutinised conflict of modern times. We wish to see a viable Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem and fret that acknowledging Israel’s capital would prejudice or hinder that.

This is an error born of a paradox. Mindful of its history in Palestine, Britain wishes to be uninvolved in the conflict but uninvolved in a way that aggrandises its status in the region. By withholding recognition of Jerusalem, we tell ourselves, the UK is advancing the cause of peace. Without wishing to sound like one of those ‘Britain is crap, ackshually’ historians, we are seriously overstating our swing in this part of the world. The Palestinian conflict with Israel will end when the Palestinians accept their own state alongside the Jewish state. Nothing we say or do is likely to influence them either way. This is their conflict, not ours.

Those of us who advocate recognition tend to do so in political, historical, moral, legal and, yes, emotional terms. But there is also a realist case. Under these terms, recognising Jerusalem is not about what Israel or the Palestinians want. It is about what the UK considers its foreign policy ought to be. What is in our interests? Some might argue that it is in our interests to be scrupulously even-handed and leave well enough alone. Even if that were true, the fact is that we are not neutral at present. Even as it refuses to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty in any part of Jerusalem, the UK government defines East Jerusalem as part of the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’. So our position is not one of balance or non-intervention. We have intervened in the conflict to say that East Jerusalem belongs to the Palestinians and West Jerusalem is up for debate.

This is the status quo fiercely guarded by the Foreign Office mandarinocracy. While it is cloaked in the language of cautious diplomacy and international law, it reflects preferences and prejudices that are ultimately ideological in nature. Among the journalists, academics, NGO staffers and policy-makers who take an interest in these matters, there is a humanitarian sympathy for the Palestinian people and a political affinity for their cause unmatched by similar sentiments towards the Israelis. Partial empathy breeds partiality.

The realist case for recognising Israel’s capital is not about empathy or sentiment. It is about statecraft. Does upholding the failed status quo advance or hinder our material interests? Israeli companies support thousands of jobs in the UK. London, Scotland and the north-west alone sell half a billion in goods to Israel every year. Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva provides one in every six medicines prescribed on the NHS. Mossad has supplied us with information that has helped break up terrorist cells in London. It is plain where our interests lie.

What will the government do? I have established that the review set up under Liz Truss has not been cancelled but I have not been able to ascertain whether this will remain the case. Rishi Sunak’s government is days old and arrived in a climate of chaos, so the new broom will still be doing its sweeping. The 57th prime minister called Jerusalem ‘the undisputed capital’ of Israel during his leadership campaign and said there was ‘a very strong case for it to be recognised’. However, he admitted to being less familiar with the ‘sensitivities’ of such a move given he had never served as foreign secretary.

There is a way to proceed while showing deference to those sensitivities. Locate the embassy in western Jerusalem. Issue a statement recognising Israel’s capital and acknowledging the Jewish connections to the city. Then add the following:

The specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem are subject to final status negotiations between the parties. The United Kingdom is not taking a position on boundaries or borders.

This is the disclaimer the United States included in its recognition of Jerusalem in 2017. By following this model, the UK could state the plain truth about Israel’s capital without foreclosing on the possibility that part of the city becomes the capital of an eventual Palestinian state. Like the Americans, the UK would not be dictating borders, it would simply be clarifying its own position and leaving the business of map-drawing and treaty-framing to the people on the ground.

The Prime Minister would still come under pressure from defenders of the status quo, but in dispensing with their moribund dogma, he would not only be advancing Britain’s interests. He would be treating Jerusalem like the ‘shared city’ opponents of recognition claim to believe in.