President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and his announcement that he will move the embassy there from Tel Aviv will have a number of consequences for Israelis, Palestinians and the wider region.
For Israel, it has finally received from a U.S. president what it has long craved, which is righting the historic wrong of it being the only state whose self-declared capital is not recognized by the rest of the world.
Israel’s government institutions are primarily in West Jerusalem in undisputed territory, and by formally recognizing this fact, Trump acknowledged what has been obvious to Israelis since the founding of the state 70 years ago.
In declaring Jerusalem to be the capital, Trump used language that was not qualified, which some Israelis may interpret to constitute an endorsement of Israeli claims to the entirety of the city — even though Trump explicitly ruled out this announcement as prejudging final status issues or the specific borders of Israeli sovereignty in the city.
Nevertheless, even a more appropriate interpretation that the U.S. has recognized only the undisputed sections of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is an enormously positive development for the Israeli government, and it will have cause to celebrate.
For the Palestinians, Trump’s qualifier that his announcement does not prejudice final status issues, and the president’s extolling of the importance of peace, will not eliminate the bitterness of this pill.
For the Palestinians this is an extremely significant symbolic loss.
Trump’s lack of an explicit endorsement of an equal Palestinian claim to part of the city will be seen as a reversal of longstanding U.S. policy and make it far more difficult for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to continue to engage with Trump’s emerging peace initiative. It will adversely affect Palestinian cooperation with the U.S. and Israel going forward, and is likely to lead to protests and violence.
While nothing that Trump said this week has actually changed the situation on the ground, for the Palestinians this is an extremely significant symbolic loss.
The Dec. 6 announcement also will make it more difficult for Sunni Arab states to be seen as publicly backing a Trump peace initiative, as Jerusalem remains one of the most sensitive issues among Arab publics.
Serving as boosters for the Trump peace plan or being seen as heading toward normalization with Israel following this announcement will put Arab governments in a political bind, and despite the president’s prediction that this move will make a peace agreement easier, the opposite is likely to be the case.
Public opinion serves as a heavy brake even in authoritarian states, and while the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has subsided for many Arabs in recent years, any changes in Jerusalem’s status quo have the ability to reverse that trend given the unique sensitivity surrounding the city.
While the Trump announcement will change nothing on the ground, as Israel’s capital was Jerusalem even before Trump acknowledged it and moving the embassy will take years, the symbolism should not be understated.
In declaring Jerusalem as Israel’s capital without making a clear statement that the U.S. does not recognize unhindered Israeli sovereignty in eastern Jerusalem, Trump may end up killing his own peace initiative in the cradle for the sake of an announcement whose timing was unnecessary now.
The “Israeli policy forum” is pretty much well full of lefties that noone likes or respects.
When they say that recogornizing Jerusalem may hurt the ability of arabs states to get behind a trump solution they demonstrate their stupidity.
There’s a reason why pseudo intellectual dbs get jobs in think tanks and policy institutes. Nobody wants the idiots actually in charge of anything.
Arabs states don’t like “palestineans”. They really don’t care about “palestine” except that it gives them an excuse and a place to march the “palestineans” that ran away into their countries and their laziness, violence and terrorism off to.
But they can’t be seen as abasing themselves before Jews. They can’t be seen as compromising with Jews. They can’t let it get out that they actually like Israel. Having a Jewish state that can bomb nuclear reactors and keep Iran in line is pretty useful. Otherwise they’d have to be seen attacking fellow Muslims.
But if the us actually shows some balls and says make a deal or we’re out a deal becomes possible cause arabs can say that that they didn’t give in to jews, the us forced their hand.
Finally someone in the us government must have got a brain and started using it.
I’m not saying it’s gonna work. I don’t think anything will except time.
But it’s a better idea than any before it.
This author is a well known leftie.
The two-state solution is a textbook example of cognitive dissonance on a grand political scale.
With regards to its plausibility, like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution did not solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.
Rather, the two-state solution was a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people. It solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel as Muslim terrorists in the Middle East.
In hindsight, the consequences of giving terrorists a country to play with were always about as predictable as running a toaster in the shower.