Eight Consulates That Answer to No One
Eight countries — France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey — maintain consulates-general in Jerusalem whose diplomats report straight to their home foreign ministries, bypassing their own ambassadors in Tel Aviv. This episode traces where that strange arrangement comes from: sixteenth-century Ottoman capitulations, a seventeenth-century French consul named Jean Lempereur, a nineteenth-century wave of pilgrim-serving missions, and the corpus separatum — the UN's 1947 plan to internationalize Jerusalem that was never implemented but never revoked. We also look at the…
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