Michael I. Krauss & J. Peter Pham: The U.S. should move its embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel
Forty years ago this week, on the third day of the Six-Day War, Israel entered the Old City of Jerusalem. Returning to the Western Wall from which he and all other Jews had, in blatant violation of the terms of the 1949 armistice, been excluded by Jordanian occupiers, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a succinct announcement that reflected the weight of millennial hopes and yearnings: “The Israel Defense Forces have liberated Jerusalem. We have reunited the torn city, the capital of Israel. We have returned to this most sacred shrine, never to part from it again.”
In addition to moral claims arising from the Holy City’s place as the focal point of Jewish spiritual and national aspirations over three thousand years, Israel has legal rights deriving from Jordan’s illegal 1948-67 occupation — branded by United Nations Secretary-General Trygve Lie as “armed aggression” — and Israel’s 1967 acquisition of control following a war of self-defense. As Professor Stephen Schwebel, later president of the International Court of Justice, noted in his now classic study “What Weight to Conquest?” in the American Journal of International Law: “when the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against the prior holder, better title.” (For more details on the background of the conflict as well as its legal significance, especially for the often cited — and misunderstood — United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, see our TCS Daily op-ed “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” as well as our August 2006 Commentary essay “Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders.”)
Neither the passage of time nor the failure of terror attacks and intifadas has diminished the ardor of Arab leaders for the “complete liberation of Palestine and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence” (article 12 of the constitution of the Fatah movement of the late Yasser Arafat and his faux moderate successor Mahmoud Abbas). Fatah would replace Israel with a Palestinian state “with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem [as] its capital city” (article 13). If readers have any doubt about what this means, a visit to the terrorist group’s official Arabic website may help: Fatah’s emblem is a map of its future state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, between two crossed guns, their preferred instrument for achieving that objective.
Inexcusably, one of the parties feeding the deluded ambitions of Arab fantasists for the destruction of the Jewish State is none other than Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States. In a part of the world where symbolism is paramount, it is tragic that the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains in Tel Aviv on Hayarkon Street, quite literally on the beach, as if ready to be swept into the sea along with the state to which its diplomats are accredited. The profoundly insulting nature of the U.S.’s refusal to move its embassy to its host nation’s capital has been widely recognized by a broad bipartisan consensus of the U.S. Congress. Thus, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-45) passed both houses by extraordinary veto-proof majorities (93-5 in the Senate, 374-37 in the House). The Act made the following findings, among others:...
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In addition to moral claims arising from the Holy City’s place as the focal point of Jewish spiritual and national aspirations over three thousand years, Israel has legal rights deriving from Jordan’s illegal 1948-67 occupation — branded by United Nations Secretary-General Trygve Lie as “armed aggression” — and Israel’s 1967 acquisition of control following a war of self-defense. As Professor Stephen Schwebel, later president of the International Court of Justice, noted in his now classic study “What Weight to Conquest?” in the American Journal of International Law: “when the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against the prior holder, better title.” (For more details on the background of the conflict as well as its legal significance, especially for the often cited — and misunderstood — United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, see our TCS Daily op-ed “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” as well as our August 2006 Commentary essay “Why Israel Is Free to Set Its Own Borders.”)
Neither the passage of time nor the failure of terror attacks and intifadas has diminished the ardor of Arab leaders for the “complete liberation of Palestine and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence” (article 12 of the constitution of the Fatah movement of the late Yasser Arafat and his faux moderate successor Mahmoud Abbas). Fatah would replace Israel with a Palestinian state “with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem [as] its capital city” (article 13). If readers have any doubt about what this means, a visit to the terrorist group’s official Arabic website may help: Fatah’s emblem is a map of its future state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, between two crossed guns, their preferred instrument for achieving that objective.
Inexcusably, one of the parties feeding the deluded ambitions of Arab fantasists for the destruction of the Jewish State is none other than Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States. In a part of the world where symbolism is paramount, it is tragic that the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains in Tel Aviv on Hayarkon Street, quite literally on the beach, as if ready to be swept into the sea along with the state to which its diplomats are accredited. The profoundly insulting nature of the U.S.’s refusal to move its embassy to its host nation’s capital has been widely recognized by a broad bipartisan consensus of the U.S. Congress. Thus, the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (Public Law 104-45) passed both houses by extraordinary veto-proof majorities (93-5 in the Senate, 374-37 in the House). The Act made the following findings, among others:...