An embassy in Jerusalem is not the problem
On a glorious sunny day, several hundred guests assembled Monday afternoon at the American Embassy in Jerusalem for the official opening ceremony.
Among the carefully curated attendees were the president and prime minister of Israel, numerous cabinet ministers, the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, head of the Mossad, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Trump adviser Jason Greenblatt and numerous U.S. congressmen and senators. The gravitas of the occasion was palpable, as were the unimaginable security challenges.
Seventy years ago, to the day, almost to the hour, Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, announced to the world the creation of the modern state of Israel. Jerusalem, he declared, was the ancient, eternal and present capital city. Recognition of the fledgling nation was immediate by much of the international community, but the claim to Jerusalem was ignored.
Until last December, when President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Embassy in Israel would move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. International backlash was fierce and swift.
Within 24 hours of this historic statement, Justin Trudeau — not generally prone to making decisive foreign policy statements on matters other than ethnic and gender diversity and feminism — declared, unequivocally, that the Canadian Embassy would remain in Tel Aviv.
In the ensuing weeks, the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly voted on resolutions condemning the U.S. move which, it was asserted, would vanquish the Palestinian cause and any hope for a two-state solution. The General Assembly resolution reiterated the view that no country should establish an embassy in Jerusalem, and that the city’s status was an issue to be resolved by Israel and the Palestinians, with the latter having clearly staked East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
Mincing no words, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, dismissed each of those assertions in the UNGA Resolution and made clear that the decision where to locate the embassy was one that America made as a sovereign nation.
Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Marc-André Blanchard, chose to express Canada’s concerns in a curious manner. “Denying the connection between Jerusalem and the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths,” he stated, “undermines the integrity of the site for all. We also reiterate the need to maintain the status quo at Jerusalem’s Holy sites,” Blanchard said.
It was an odd reply, as the U.S. embassy move does nothing of the sort. It does not deny or undermine Jerusalem’s status as a holy city for several religions, as he suggests. Nor does it in any way alter the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy sites.
Blanchard’s comments and talking points are absurdly and worryingly dissociated from reality. They were meant, one surmises, to explain Canada’s abstention on the UNGA vote. Such oddly disconnected justifications were also attempted by Adam Austen, a spokesperson for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who repeated the worn mantra that Jerusalem’s final status may only be decided by negotiations between the parties.
The move of an embassy does not preclude, decide, predetermine or prejudge anything. Anticipating such rote backlash, Trump’s advisers were careful to include specific assurances to that effect in his speech.
And his speech was in line with existing U.S. policy. The Jerusalem Embassy Act was passed by Congress in 1995. It recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and called for the city to remain undivided. Since that time, each successive president has pledged to fully implement the law and relocate the embassy, only to invoke a procedural delay mechanism, waiving a final decision every six months.
But not Trump. “Finally,” said Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, in his remarks at the ceremony Monday, ”we have a leader who promised this and kept his promise!”
If only Canada would make a similar decision. When the matter of the U.S. embassy move took to the UNGA floor, Trudeau explained Canada’s abstention by belittling the issue; presenting it as a trifling matter which he was determined to rise above. “We are less interested in grousing and playing politics,” he said. "We are more interested in finding solutions and moving forward at a substantial level.”
Inferentially, of course, his dismissiveness reflects the stale thinking that permeates much of the global institutional foreign policy establishment, including his advisers at Global Affairs Canada; specifically, that to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel somehow vitiates any possibility of negotiating peace between the Palestinians and Israelis. Such a “unilateral” move, the refrain goes, predetermines the outcome of negotiations.
It is a silly notion that, oft repeated, has become a truism. Locating the embassy in Jerusalem does nothing more than affirm reality. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The Knesset and important government institutions are located there. No Western diplomat objects to attending meetings in Jerusalem. Such conduct does not, apparently, undermine peace. And neither will the relocation of the embassy.
The ceremony Monday was dignified and attended by an astonishing array of political and thought leaders, primarily from America and Israel. I was asked, repeatedly, if Canada would move its embassy. And I responded, repeatedly, that it would not. It was more difficult to explain why.