Canberra’s reasoning for a peculiar flip-flop — its decision to decline to move the Australian embassy to Israel’s capital from Tel Aviv — carries an odor of rank hostility. 

The Aussie foreign minister, Penny Wong, certainly made a hash of it. A Labor party stalwart, Ms. Wong at first said on Monday that her left-leaning government would stick with its conservative predecessor’s decision to recognize West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and to move the embassy there from Tel Aviv.

“The former government made the decision to recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Ms. Wong said in a statement. The current government that came to power this spring, headed by Prime Minister Albanese, has made “no decision to change” its direction, she added. 

A few hours later, however, Ms. Wong reversed herself, saying that the former conservative government’s decision on Jerusalem has “caused conflict and distress in part of the Australian community,” so the embassy will remain at Tel Aviv. 

Ms. Wong didn’t specify which “community” was so distressed by the relocation of an embassy half a world away. Yet, she did intimate that the reason the former prime minister, Scott Morrison, decided in 2018 to acknowledge that Jersuelam is Israel’s capital was to appease the country’s Jews. 

“You know what this was?” Ms. Wong said. “This was a cynical play, unsuccessful, to win the seat of Wentworth and a by-election.” A Sydney beach community, Wentworth is home for many Australian Jews. 

In effect, Ms. Wong was accusing Mr. Morrison of succumbing to the whims of a group that may have its loyalties elsewhere. That group is so powerful, her statement insinuated, that it has forced Mr. Morrison, an avowed Pentecostal Christian, to make a diplomatic decision that would cause “conflict and distress” among some unspecified Australians. 

Mr. Morrison’s political opponents have long taken it for granted that the Jews made him do it. Yet, his original statement on Jerusalem mentioned no community, Jewish or otherwise, and it was made shortly after securing the premiership in 2018. Rather than appeasing the Jews of Sydney, his reasoning had to do with the realities of the Mideast.  

“Australia now recognises West Jerusalem, being the seat of the Knesset and many of the institutions of government, as the capital of Israel,” Mr. Morrison said in 2018. 

Ms. Wong’s about-face did not sit well with Israelis, and Jews worldwide were aghast. Her “ignorant comment, based on the insinuation that foreign policy was dictated by a handful of Jews, reeks of bigotry,” a founder of the Lawfare Project think tank, Brooke Goldstein, told the Sun. “Jerusalem is the ancient holy city of the Jewish faith whose roots go back farther than any Sydney — or Australian suburb.”

The Israeli foreign ministry summoned the Australian ambassador for a meek dressing down. “Jerusalem is the eternal capital of united Israel and nothing will ever change that,” Prime Minister Lapid said in a statement. 

“In light of the way in which the decision was made in Australia, as a hasty response to incorrect news in the media, we can only hope that the Australian government manages other matters more seriously and professionally,” Mr. Lapid added. 

In 2018 President Trump overrode such qualms among the American state department’s bureaucrats and obeyed a directive — passed by a nearly unanimous Congress — requiring the American embassy in Israel to be moved  to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. 

At the United Nations last month, Britain’s prime minister, Liz Truss, who describes herself as avowed Zionist, made a promise to Mr. Lapid to “review” the relocation of the British embassy to the Israeli capital. Since then foreign policy “experts” have urged Ms. Truss to rethink that position, according to the Financial Times. 

Moving the embassy would be “reckless and unprincipled,” and would “mark a fundamental shift in UK foreign policy,” a former foreign minister, Alan Duncan, told the FT. 

Perhaps not that fundamental: The United Kingdom “owns a plot of land in Jerusalem long earmarked as site of a future embassy in Israel,” a London-based journalist, Dania Akkad, reported today in a long Twitter thread detailing the history of the site and including relevant documents.

In most cases, the permanent foreign policy bureaucrats who oppose recognizing Israel’s capital predict that it would lead to violence across the region. That prediction failed to materialize after Mr. Trump relocated the American embassy to Jerusalem.

On the contrary, after America made clear it was moving its embassy, the peace process really took off in the form of the Abraham Accords, which have been entered into by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, as well as Israel. 

Australia appropriated native lands in 1913 to make room for its new capital, Canberra. Jerusalem, in contrast, has served as the spiritual and physical capital of the Jewish people for nearly 3,000 years. The western part of the city was declared Israel’s capital upon the country’s founding, in 1948. It was united with the ancient east part in 1967.