If our oral tradition is to be trusted, one of the earliest diplomatic mission Ethiopia ever embraced dates back millennia. Back then, the queen of Sheba attended a lavish banquet at King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem – religious and administrative centre of the Kingdom of Judah since around the 8th Century B.C. Her son from Solomon would come to be known as Menelik I, according to the genealogy of the Solomonic dynasty, who also sails to Jerusalem in another historic diplomatic mission.
Fast forward over two millennia, past the coming and downfalls of mighty empires, and Ethiopia remains well connected diplomatically to the city. Upon the declaration of the establishment of modern Israel in May 1948, Ethiopia rightly endorsed the decision. The recognition of the State of Israel by the United Nations also included the idea of a “separated body” or corpus separatum, where the plan was for a Jerusalem that would have a special status as a shared city by both Palestinians and Israelis.
Save for to the diplomatic act of today’s Ethiopia that voted in favour of the recent United Nations’ resolution against the United States’ (US) recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, numerous Israeli citizens of Ethiopian descent still make a living in that city.
Our diplomatic mission at the UN should instead have been more inward-looking, better conscious of the long-term geopolitical interests and developmental strategies of the nation. Above all, whether at the chamber of the UN or from other diplomatic missions around the world, the decisions and positions taken by our diplomats have to be meaningful to both Ethiopians living at home and abroad.
Tens of thousands of Bete Israel of Ethiopian origin are citizens of Israel and living there on a permanent basis. They represent our historical ties of the past to Jerusalem while their presence demographically defines the future relationships between Ethiopia and Israel.
On a bilateral basis, Ethiopia and Israel have relationships that cover decades, where the East African nation has as few close allies as the Jewish state in the Middles East. Unfortunately, our missions in the world of diplomacy appear to get stuck in the cracks created for short-term political gains that seriously overlook the essential elements of the history at play.
In spite of all that is at stake, the Ethiopian diplomatic mission at the UN has stood by without using the opportunity to earn some political points on the world stage. The move, as Raphael Morav, the Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia, has put it, not in as many words, an act of betrayal that would have negative diplomatic consequences.
Soon after the US President Donald Trump formally recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and instructed the nation’s State Department to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the government of Ethiopia should have found the courage to appear neutral. But it instead opted to vote for the UN resolution to declare the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “null and void”. Ethiopia did as such alongside Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, Uzbekistan, key among the 128 countries in support of the resolution.
Ironically, Ethiopia is only second to Afghanistan when it comes to being an aid recipient of the United States, yet another evidence that the vote did not consider the reverberating consequences.
What good does such a resolution do for Ethiopia?
Indeed, the devil lurks in the detail of diplomacy. In a rare display of courage and independence, African nations, such as Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda were either absent from the Assembly or abstained. By virtue of the fact that Ethiopia supported the resolution, the government not only was misguided but also failed to seize a historic opportunity to reaffirm a diplomatic position that would not have been detrimental to trade and politics.
It is known that what exists between the two countries is a matter of historical and religious interpretations. Both fervently believe that Jerusalem belongs to them. The issue is apparently for the two nations to work out and come to a compromise. Thus, for Ethiopia to have come and put itself right in the middle of the issue was a severely unwise move whose consequences we will begin to reap as time goes by. The better option would have been to opt for what the likes of Canada and Cameroon went for, an abstention.
If the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got it right describing diplomacy as an art of intimacy, it could only be relevant when such an intimacy artfully defines modern diplomacy in no less way than Queen Sheba of Ethiopia had manoeuvred it almost three millennia ago in Jerusalem.
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