Jerusalem

As the whole world knows, the United States has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced plans to move the embassy there. I know the proposed site of the new embassy quite well—it is only three blocks from our apartment in the Jerusalem neighborhood known as Arnona, and roughly twice that far from the existing consulate. (Why we would need a consulate and an embassy that close to each other has yet to be revealed, at least to me. Presumably there’s a concept here!) But the specific site of the proposed new embassy is hardly the issue—other than with respect to its location on the Israeli side—barely—of the so-called Green Line that separates the land that was part of the State of Israel before 1967 both from land that belonged to Jordan and territory that was formally designated as no-man’s-land back then and which belonged neither to Israel nor to Jordan. Far more important is the decision itself…and the implications and ramifications such a decision will inevitably entail.

In his remarks, the President played down the decision as a mere recognition of facts on the ground. And although there is something to be said for analyzing things that way, Jerusalem not being the theoretical or hypothetical capital of Israel but a fully functioning seat of government with all the buildings and bureaucracy that such a designation entails, it is also just a bit glib and fails to take into account all the myriad reasons any rational observer could easily martial against making such a move at this time. Nonetheless, I believe the President did the right thing. And I’d like to use this space this week to explain why I think that.

First of all, it’s hard to fault the President for obeying the law. I am thinking specifically of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which passed the Senate by a 93-5 vote and the House of Representatives by a 374-37 margin, and which called upon our government formally to do both things President Trump did this week: recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and grant teeth to that recognition by locating our embassy there. That being the case, it would be entirely legitimate to wonder how to we here at all, twenty-two years after the passage of that bill into law by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the legislature. It’s an excellent question, one that apparently occurred to our nation’s senators as well—who voted unanimously (90-0) last June to adopt a resolution calling on the President to abide by the Jerusalem Embassy Act.

Formally, the answer has to do with the fact that the Constitution reserves the conduct of foreign policy to the President, for which reason Section 7 of the bill formally permits the sitting President to suspend the implementation of the bill’s provisions for a six-month period if the President reports to Congress that such a suspension is necessary to protect our nation’s security. And that is exactly what has happened for each six-month period since the law went into effect in 1998: Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, all of whom openly derided the bill as unwarranted interference by Congress with the President’s right to conduct foreign policy, also—I’m sure entirely coincidentally—concluded that moving our embassy to Jerusalem would somehow adversely affect our nation’s security. Since it’s hard to imagine in what specific sense our nation’s security depends on the specific address of our embassy in Israel, President Trump correctly chose to obey the law of the land and not to flout the will of the people with reference to some threat to national safety that no preceding president even bothered to try actually to identify. So there’s that.

And then there’s the reality on the ground to consider. Even looking past the fact that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel in every meaningful sense, denying Israel the right to determine all on its own where its capital city should be located—a right not even questioned with respect to any other country of the world—implies that the Jewish claim to Jerusalem is somehow spurious or bogus, a view mostly put forward (other than by crackpots who revel in their ignorance of history) by the kind of haters who also question Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland. To insist that, alone among the nations of the world, Israel does not have the right to establish its capital wherever it wishes is tantamount to saying that Israel is not an autonomous country in the sense that the other countries of the world are, that for some reason it alone among the nations of the world needs the permission of others to conduct its own business as it sees fit.

And then there is the history issue to deal with as well. Part of the Palestinian propaganda campaign intended to make people question the right of Israel to exist has taken the form of ongoing disinformation regarding the history of Jerusalem itself. There have been, by universal scholarly consensus, Jews living in Jerusalem since around the tenth century BCE. Jerusalem was the capital of David’s kingdom and Solomon’s, and was then the capital of the Kingdom of Judah for as long as it existed. Later, it was the capital of the Maccabees’ kingdom, and it has been universally acknowledged, both by Jews in the Land of Israel and throughout the diaspora, as the spiritual center of all Jewish life ever since. Indeed, the fact that Jews who take prayer seriously pray for the well-being and security of the city three times a day is not irrelevant to this discussion. Nor is the fact that every observant Jew prays for the peace of Jerusalem when reciting the Grace after Meals over the course of a lifetime’s worth of meals. The Burial Kaddish we recite at graveside even includes a prayer for the peace of Jerusalem so that the last words an individual’s spirit might possibly hear before setting forth for the Next World are infused with a people’s love for its holy city. Jerusalem is so deeply woven into the warp and woof of Jewishness that it simply cannot be excised, without Judaism suffering the same fate any heart patient would meet if his or her cardiologist decided to solve the problem simply and efficiently by removing the patient’s heart and hoping for the best.

To question the historical relationship of the Jewish people to Jerusalem—which is the only real reason to question the right of Israel to declare Jerusalem as its capital city—is to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish faith itself. This is not a position anyone who does not wish to be perceived as the walking embodiment of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism should ever feel comfortable being associated with, let alone espousing openly.

And then, on top of all that, there is the question of the Palestinians, who also wish to designate Jerusalem as the capital city of their state.  If this week’s decision does any real good, it will lie in convincing the Palestinians once and for all that they can have the state they claim so ardently to desire, and they can have it almost instantly and with Jerusalem as its capital. That, of course, will require sitting down with the Israelis and hammering out a final agreement that will suit all parties to it…and it is precisely that that the Palestinians seem unwilling actually to do. When I hear people castigating Israel for denying the Palestinians a state, I can’t quite understand the argument—it seems to me that the Palestinians could declare the independence of their state tomorrow with the almost full approval of the entire Arab and Western worlds, work out the details, and move forward from there with Jerusalem as their capital as well. If the Israelis can have their capital in West Jerusalem, why can’t the Palestinians have theirs in East Jerusalem? (The President specifically noted that this week’s decision does not move away from our commitment to the notion of Israel and the future state of Palestine negotiating its borders as part of an overall peace agreement.) But the world has appeared all too willing to let the Palestinians go on and on for years about the unfair way they are being deprived a state of their own when the reality is precisely the opposite. It’s the Catalonians and the Chechens (and, yes, the Navajo and the Cherokees) who can’t have their own country, not the Palestinians…who can have one simply by declaring their independence, negotiating the border, and getting to work building their nation. Who would say no? Haven’t 135 of the world’s nations already recognized such a state even without it actually existing? If moving our embassy to Jerusalem prods the Palestinians into meaningful action (and not into the kind of senseless violence that will ultimately lead nowhere at all), it will have been worth the ruckus the President’s announcement is sure to provoke in an already hostile world and its already hostile media.

We—we who stand with Israel and who believe in Israel’s inalienable right to exist and to flourish—we have been expected to look on without choking as the United Nations and its various affiliates, most notably UNESCO, approve more and more poisonous, deeply anti-Semitic, ahistorical, amoral, and profoundly offensive resolutions calling into question the ancient, ongoing, and permanent Jewish ties to Jerusalem.  So now, for once, a formidable power in the world—the United States government—has decided to act forcefully and meaningfully on behalf of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city. I have to say that it’s good to feel marginally less alone than we usually do.  More than that, actually. A lot more.