ON 6 DECEMBER 2017, the United States government formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. On 14 May 2018, it commenced the process of relocating the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the Holy City. The Trump administration rationalized its departure from longstanding US positions and its dramatic rupture with the international consensus on Jerusalem, as an overdue endorsement of the sovereign right of Israel to determine the location of its capital city and an expression of the sovereign right of the United States to determine the location of its diplomatic missions to foreign states. President Trump further stated that the United States was merely conferring belated recognition upon a longstanding political reality and, by so doing, was facilitating rather than complicating the search for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
If the diplomatic principles cited by the United States to justify its decision appear self-evident, it is equally the case that in order to obtain legitimacy, these principles must be applied within the framework of international law and diplomatic convention. Israel’s claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem and US recognition and actions in support of such claims, singularly fail to meet this test. This reality has been at least formally recognized by every previous US administration, all of which refused to endorse Israel’s position on Jerusalem, and each of which either helped forge or acted to maintain the prevailing international consensus on the Holy City. More recently, this reality was once again emphasized in the United Nations Security Council when, on 18 December 2017, 14 of its 15 members, including Washington’s closest allies, supported a draft resolution, vetoed by the United States, that rejected the Trump declaration.
That every US president from Truman to Obama, including those who as candidates pledged to align US policy on Jerusalem with Israel’s, consistently refrained from defying the international consensus on Jerusalem ultimately reflects their recognition of the unique status of the Holy City and of the catastrophic consequences of permitting Israel to unilaterally determine its future. Simply put, Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in any form is inconceivable without a mutually satisfactory disposition of Jerusalem. Additionally, without a capital in East Jerusalem there can be no Palestinian state and thus no two-state settlement. At the same time, and to a greater extent than any other issue, the fate of Jerusalem is central not only to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to the Arab-Israeli one as well. No other city on earth is simultaneously held sacred by the three Abrahamic faiths and their various denominations or holds a greater capacity for unleashing religious and sectarian strife.
The Trump administration initially sought to ameliorate the significance and impact of its actions by asserting that it was not taking a position on the territorial scope of Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, that it continued to support a negotiated Israeli-Palestinian agreement on the status of the Holy City, and that the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would not commence for at least several years. Yet, President Trump subsequently, and repeatedly, claimed that his measures had taken “Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore”,[i] while the US embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated less than five months after the proclamation of recognition. If the United States is not explicitly supporting Israel’s claim of exclusive sovereignty over the entirety of Jerusalem, the rest of the world –Israel and the Palestinians included – has responded on the basis that the United States has taken a decisive turn in this direction.
In view of the extraordinary threat a disintegration of the international consensus on Jerusalem has for Palestinian rights, the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace, global religious co-existence, and indeed international peace and security, and the unrivalled capacity of the United States to challenge this consensus, this publication reviews the historical and diplomatic record in order to provide a better understanding of longstanding US and international policy on Jerusalem. In so doing, it seeks to emphasize the importance of ensuring that the status of Jerusalem is resolved on the basis of established diplomatic principles and international law, and to highlight the concomitant dangers of empowering Israel’s illegal and illegitimate assertions of exclusive sovereignty over, and associated activities within, the Holy City.
[i] See, for example, “Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel Before Bilateral Meeting” 25 January 2018. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-netanyahu-israel-bilateral-meeting-davos-switzerland/.