By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--December 6, 2017
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For 70 years, the U.S. embassy has been based in Tel Aviv -- along with embassies of almost all other countries with relations to Israel -- because the U.S. has wanted Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to determine the final status of Jerusalem. The United Nations' original partition plan from 1947 on Palestine called for Jerusalem to be an international city. The U.S. government, as a result, does not officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Efforts to move the embassy from the coast of Tel Aviv to the holy city have surfaced periodically since at least the early 1980s. President Reagan and his secretary of state, George Shultz, were against the move. Lawmakers later passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, signed into law by President Clinton, which authorized the U.S. to move the embassy to Jerusalem by 1999 with one caveat -- the president could indefinitely delay the move by signing a waiver, citing national security concerns. In June, Mr. Trump signed the waiver for the first time in his presidency, delaying a move of the embassy to Jerusalem.Politicians often try to give the appearance of taking an action while actually having no serious intention of doing what they pretend to be doing. Clinton may well have been trying to pander to American Jews when he signed that bill into law. But he signed it nonetheless, and the law makes clear that the U.S. does as a matter of official policy consider Jerusalem to be Israel's true capital. Now, the professional diplomat crowd never wants to stir up any hornet's nests, and the Middle East is nothing but that. One president after another has gotten cold feet on supporting Israel's true security needs out of a quixotic desire to broker a "Middle East peace agreement" that never seems to come. And it never comes because the Palestinians and the larger Arab/Muslim world absolutely do not want peace with Israel. They want to destroy Israel. Yet American presidents constantly try mollify them so as not to disturb the "peace process."
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