Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
U.S. envoy to conduct duties in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem is set to open with great fanfare Monday, but the American ambassador to Israel will not yet work permanently out of his new office there, administration officials said Friday, and instead will split his time between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
That solution might be practical, given that there is little spare space in the Jerusalem building, and most of the embassy staff will be remaining in the Tel Aviv branch of the embassy for the time being. But it may also help get around any diplomatic awkwardness, allowing the ambassador, David Friedman, to continue to host officials whose countries oppose the U.S. Embassy move.
President Donald Trump, who fulfilled a campaign promise by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last year, will not attend the opening but will address the event by video. The embassy move goes against an international consensus that it prejudges the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the future status of the contested city.
The planned opening comes at a time when Israel and Iran have launched attacks against each other as Iran maintains a foothold in Syria. Iran fired rockets at Israel shortly after Trump announced on Tuesday that the United States would pull out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Critics have said the embassy move will isolate Israel in the region. But the Trump administration disputes that, pointing to comments on Thursday from the foreign minister of Bahrain, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, who tweeted in support of Israel and said it had the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression.
The embassy that is opening on Monday, in what was up to now the consular services section of the U.S. Consulate General, will be temporary. The United States is searching for a permanent site, a process that is expected to take years.
The embassy compound sits partly in a section of Jerusalem known as a no man’s land. The area consists of land divided in an armistice agreement between Jordan and Israel at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and boundary lines were drawn in grease pencil. Most of the world views it as occupied territory.
Last week, road signs pointing the way to the embassy in the neighborhood of Arnona in south Jerusalem were changed from “U.S. Consulate” to “U.S. Embassy,” printed in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
The embassy is partly in predominantly Jewish west Jerusalem and partly in predominantly Arab east Jerusalem. Palestinians have long hoped that east Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state. Home to the third-holiest mosque in Islam as well as the holiest site in Judaism, the city poses highly sensitive issues for Muslims and Jews. The city also is sacred to Christians.
In moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump reversed decades of America’s approach to the Holy City, one of the world’s most contested pieces of land. Congress passed a law in the 1990s requiring that the embassy be moved to Jerusalem, and other presidents had promised to do so, only to exercise a waiver in the law permitting them to hold off, for fear that it would set off a backlash and complicate peace negotiations.
Not only did Trump break from that by declaring Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital, but he has also abandoned America’s commitment to a two-state solution to the conflict that would involve the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, a position that had been a bedrock of U.S. policy for years. Trump has said he would be fine with a one-state solution if the two sides agreed, a position that has emboldened Israeli opponents of a Palestinian nation who have declared the death of the twostate solution.
Palestinians in Gaza have been staging weekly protests at the Israel border fence against a decade-old blockade of the territory. The demonstrations have been organized by Gaza’s Hamas rulers, but are fueled by despair among the territory’s 2 million residents.
The Israeli military said Saturday that it was shutting down its main cargo crossing into Gaza after Palestinian protesters caused extensive damage to it, and that it had also destroyed an attack tunnel militants dug near its main pedestrian crossing.
The developments come ahead of a potentially charged week along the Israel-Gaza border as weekly protests there are expected to culminate with a potential breach of the border.
Thousands of Palestinians protested Friday in various locations along the frontier. Later, a group of Palestinians burned a fuel complex and conveyor belt on their side of the Kerem Shalom crossing, causing more than $9 million in damage and disrupting the import of diesel fuel and building materials, the military said. It said the attack rendered the main fuel and gas lines unusable and caused further damage to electrical infrastructure and other vital equipment.
The military said the Kerem Shalom crossing will be closed until further notice and not before the damage is repaired.