 Yesterday, Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister officiated over the opening of his country's new embassy in Jerusalem. The embassy will be located in the Malcha Technology Park in the south of the city. In opening an embassy in Jerusalem, Papua New Guinea became only the fifth country to open an embassy in the city. Today let's take a quick look at the topic of embassies in Jerusalem. There are 193 member states in the UN, and even though there are still countries which refuse to recognize Israel or accept its passports, Israel enjoys official diplomatic relations with the majority of world nations, more than 165 of them in total. A physical manifestation of the existence of diplomatic relations is the opening of embassies and consulates in other countries. These can take the form of embassies, consulates, consulate generals, and even voluntary honoree consulates manned on a part-time basis by dedicated amateurs. The exact designation depends on the seniority of the mission and where it fits within a national hierarchy. For less significant diplomatic relations, countries can even maintain relations with one another through having an embassy in a third country. This is called non-resident representation. Israel maintains embassies in more than 80 countries worldwide, while altogether there are almost 100 foreign consulates and embassies in Israel. But given that there are only 5 in Jerusalem, it stands to reason that the vast majority of them are not situated in the city. You can see this by typing embassy into Google Maps. The majority of embassies in Israel are clustered in high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv or the next-door city of Ramat Gan, Ireland's embassy in Israel which is the only one I've been to, occupies about half of the floor in a pretty nice office building in Ramat Gan. Ambassadors' residences, which are where ambassadors live but are also official diplomatic properties, tend to be located in Herzliya and Herzliya Patuach. The fact that countries don't generally base there is really embassies in Jerusalem is both very deliberate and kind of remarkable. Jerusalem is both Israel's capital city and its seat of government. So in the normal course of diplomatic affairs, it would be the place where countries put their embassies because one of the key functions of embassies is facilitating discussion between foreign governments. This isn't the case with Israel and Jerusalem because most countries formally endorse a solution to the disputed status of Jerusalem called the Corpus Separatum or the separate body. While Israel has controlled all of Jerusalem since 1967, including the part to the east of the Green Line, the Palestinians want some portion of it as a capital city for a potential state. The international community for its part has decided that the best solution to the thorny issue of what to do about one city which two people at war both want is to let them figure it out between themselves. When it comes to Jerusalem, at least on paper, this is sort of what world governments endorse. That is, until Palestinians and Israelis can agree on what to do about the city, governments don't want to endorse unilateral Israeli moves by opening diplomatic properties in the city. Of course, this situation kind of ignores the reality on the ground. Since 1967, Jerusalem has functioned as Israel's capital, where either most countries like that fact or not. So when countries do break rank with consensus and open their embassies in Jerusalem, they're either doing so out of support for Israel or out of a sense of pragmatism, recognizing that the facts on the ground are what they are and they're unlikely to change for the indefinite future. The most famous embassy opening to take place in Jerusalem occurred in 2018 when Donald Trump made a US consular property in Jerusalem, the US's visual embassy here. But it actually wasn't the first embassy to ever be opened in Jerusalem. Costa Rica and El Salvador both flirted with the idea of placing their Israeli embassies near Jerusalem in the 1980s. However, in 2006, they decided to relocate their embassies back out of Jerusalem after coming under pressure from the Arab world. Since the US took its bold move in 2018, Israel has up the ante in terms of encouraging countries to either set up embassies in Jerusalem or relocate their existing ones elsewhere in Israel to the city. However, thus far, the move has enjoyed a relatively tepid reception on the world stage. Guatemala became the second country to open an embassy in Jerusalem in 2018. Although, as you've seen, this was technically the second wave of Jerusalem embassy openings in the history of the state of Israel. That embassy is located in the Malcha Technology Park. Most minor embassies are basically small office buildings and in Israel, as elsewhere, it's not uncommon to see 10 or so smaller embassies stuffed into one high-rise building with just a row of flags on the outside highlighting that there's a diplomatic presence. Kosovo opened a small embassy on Karena Yisoud Street in 2021. This made it the first Muslim majority country to open an embassy in Jerusalem. The move didn't attract a lot of media attention at the time, and I reckon that if you asked most Jerusalemites what the building was the cool blue and gold flag was, they probably wouldn't know. Finally, we have Honduras, which joined Guatemala in the Malcha Technology Park in 2021, but seemed sort of iffy on the whole Jerusalem thing because just one year later, they were reportedly already considering moving back to Tel Aviv. But as this video is hopefully made clear, when it comes to where countries want to plop their seal on a building in Israel and call it an embassy, there are political and diplomatic repercussions, including the possible loss of trade ties and diplomatic support with the Arab world. Besides embassies in Jerusalem, there are consulate generals, but as I've covered in a separate video, these are actually sort of disguised diplomatic missions to the Palestinian Authority or PA and actually aren't even accredited to the state of Israel, so they don't really count. I hope this video was useful to get more videos about life and politics in Israel. Please consider subscribing to this channel on YouTube.