As Liz Truss’s premiership disappears into the dustbin of history, there is a policy initiative that needs to disappear with it, alongside the extreme neoliberal economic experiment that precipitated her downfall. Having trailed it in her leadership bid, Truss confirmed, after a meeting with Israeli leader Yair Lapid, that she would formally review moving the UK Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Pro-Israel voices in the UK, in welcoming this move, tried to suggest it was a mere technicality—a bureaucratic decision simply reflecting realities on the ground. The rapid condemnation of the move spanning the political spectrum, by opposition parties, senior Tories, religious leaders, the trade union movement, and leading figures from within the Jewish community gave the lie to this assertion.

In truth, the move represented a significant departure from the political consensus in the UK and globally, which has condemned Israel’s occupation and unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, and, in line with UNSCR 478, accepted that no state should endorse measures designed  to alter the character and status of the city. When Donald Trump broke with this consensus and moved the US Embassy in 2018, he was widely condemned—including by the UK government—and was followed in this move, despite intensive lobbying by both US and Israel, only by Honduras, Guatemala, and Kosovo.

Australia in the same year recognised West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital but did not move its Embassy. Last week, its government reversed that policy, returning to the status quo ante and the international consensus that Jerusalem should be a final status issue to be resolved as part of any peace negotiations.

It is quite feasible, given the body of opposition that has been vocalised and has reasserted the reality that any such move will isolate the UK, that the policy will be quietly shelved with Truss’s departure. The risk is that her putting the issue on the table has normalised it as a legitimate issue for debate, further pushing the red lines. This risk is made manifest by the alacrity of key pro-Israel groups such as Conservative Friends of Israel and the Board of Deputies in welcoming Truss’s announcement. In doing so, they have relied on the familiar script of trumpeting support for a two-state solution, while also sugar-coating Israel’s continued establishment of ‘facts on the ground’ that remove the possibility of an independent viable Palestinian state.

The deeper problem is that the consensus being violated by Truss’s move is in itself built on a lie. This is the lie that Israel is a liberal democracy, overseeing an illegal occupation which there is a genuine will within the Israeli political mainstream to end. It is a consensus that has shielded Israel from accountability, and has been sustained despite each new piece of evidence that Israel has no intention of recognising the rights of Palestinians under international law, including the right to self-determination. The reality, asserted by Palestinian civil society for decades and now accepted by a consensus of opinion across international civil society, is that Israel is a state practising the crime of apartheid.

There is a deeper reality underpinning Israel’s practice of apartheid, again articulated by Palestinian civil society for years and reaffirmed this week by the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In her most recent report, Francesca Albanese, while welcoming the body of significant reports identifying Israel’s practice of apartheid, highlights their limitations in so far as they do not fully address how apartheid has emerged.

‘The apartheid framework’, she writes, ‘does not address the “root causes” of the web of racially discriminatory laws, orders and policies that have regulated daily life in the occupied Palestinian territory since 1967 and Israeli animus (intention) in seizing land while subjugating and displacing its indigenous people and replacing them with its nationals. This is the hallmark of settler-colonialism, and a war crime under the Rome Statute.’

Israel’s desire to have states recognise Jerusalem as its capital and move their embassies in accordance with that recognition is in essence a call for international endorsement of the body of laws and policies enacted since 1948, all designed to Judaise Jersualem and erase its Palestinian identity and its continuing centrality to Palestinian life, economically, politically, and culturally. It’s a process of ethnic cleansing enacted by the direct expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in neighbourhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan; the removal of residency rights and the imposition of measures, often under the banner of ‘security’ designed to make life so intolerable that Palestinians simply leave.

Palestinians in Jerusalem, across all of the territory of historic Palestine and within the diaspora denied the right of return, will still live confronting and resisting the realities of this system of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism, whether or not the UK moves its embassy. Why it matters that the move does not go ahead is because the crossing of a further red line will present yet another step in the normalisation of this barbarous system of oppression.

That is why it is important that voices continue to be raised in opposition to the move and why, as called for in the TUC Motion passed this week at Congress, opposition parties should not just condemn it, but make clear they will reverse it, if elected. Support for this move needs to be established as existing outside of the frame of acceptable political discourse. But beyond this what is required, as called for in the international statement passed at TUC, are measures to hold Israel to account rooted in recognition of the true nature of its system of oppression. You do not have normal relations with a state practicing the crime of apartheid.  You hold it to account through policies of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction.