Obama's Struggle With Israel over Jerusalem

The Obama administration has decided to escalate its disagreement with Israel over its construction plans for new housing in eastern Jerusalem to a level that has rarely been witnessed before. It has employed all levels of the administration to critique Israel, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to presidential adviser David Axelrod. At the start of the crisis, after consulting Washington, Vice President Biden decided to "condemn" the Israeli planning proposals--language which is usually reserved for the most severe diplomatic incidents. Indeed according to reliable press reports, the administration even adopted the language of an ultimatum to Israel as it demanded a halt to the Jerusalem housing project.

There is also another nasty side to this disagreement, evident in some the U.S. press when questions are raised as to whether Israeli "intransigence" puts U.S. troops at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The truth is that Israel shares intelligence and military tactics with the U.S. to save American lives, but these facts somehow gets lost in some of the new political discourse..  Is the policy of the Obama administration representative of the traditional U.S. approach toward Israel or does it represent a sharp break from the past?

It is true that historically, the U.S. did not recognize Israel's annexation of eastern Jerusalem in July 1967, just after the Six-Day War. But in the years that followed U.S. policy contained many nuances and was tempered by several dilemmas. For example, in most wars, the UN Security Council calls for a return to the status quo ante: the situation before the outbreak of hostilities.

But the pre-war situation in 1967 was not something that Washington wanted to enshrine. After all, the previous occupier, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, invaded Jerusalem in what the UN Secretary General in 1948 called "armed aggression;" in contrast, Israel entered the same territory in a war of self-defense. Given that the Jordanians ethnically cleansed Jerusalem from its Jewish population and then denied Jews access to their holy sites for 19 years, the idea that Jerusalem would again be re-divided as it was before was unthinkable. 
 
For that reason, Stephen Schwebel, the American international law expert who would become the legal adviser to the State Department and later the President of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, made a determination in 1970 that "Israel has better title in the territory of what was Palestine including the whole of Jerusalem, than do Jordan and Egypt." As the U.S. ambassador to the UN in 1967, Arthur Goldberg pointed out years later UN Security Council Resolution 242, that became the basis of the Arab-Israeli peace process, did not even mention Jerusalem, adding "and this omission was deliberate."
 
Back in July 1969, the New York Times in fact attacked the Johnson administration for its lenient policies toward Israel on Jerusalem. What followed was a hardening of the American line on Israel with the election of Richard Nixon, whose ambassador, Charles Yost, for the first time called East Jerusalem "occupied territory." Yet in the years that followed, successive administrations sought to draw a distinction between their policies toward the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem; President Carter reprimanded his UN ambassador for voting for a resolution, by mistake, that treated West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem equally.
 
In the past, the U.S. and Israel learned to manage their differences over Jerusalem. While the Clinton administration invested huge political capital in the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the PLO, it knew well the firm position of Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who declared in a parliamentary address one month before his assassination in November 1995 that Israel will retain "a united Jerusalem." Meanwhile, that same year, the U.S. Senate voted on the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which endorsed overwhelmingly (93-5) the Israeli position on a united Jerusalem. A united Jerusalem was at the heart of the Israeli and American consensus.
 
Essentially, Washington implicitly understood how important Jerusalem was for its Israeli ally. At the end of the Hebron negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dispatched two envoys to the Clinton administration to explain that after his government undertook to re-deploy from most of Hebron, it would be building a new neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, called Har Homa. The Clinton did not endorse the plan, but understood that in diplomacy there are trade-offs. When the UN Security Council condemned Israel for building the new neighborhood, Clinton's ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, twice vetoed the draft resolutions in question. In retrospect, President Obama clearly hardened U.S. policy on Jerusalem.
 
In fact, right from the beginning, the Obama administration has been highly critical of Israel construction in eastern Jerusalem, even in well established Jewish neighborhoods, like Gilo, that grew under past administrations.  The new policy shift being witnessed must be based on an assessment in the White House that it will serve its broader American interests in the Middle East.

However, it is far more likely that the Obama administration's current approach will not enhance either peace or security in this fragile region.  Palestinian positions are likely to become more extreme.  It might have been proposed that a U.S.-Israeli crisis will repair America's ties with the Arab states, but under present circumstances most of them want to know, above all, how President Obama will neutralize Iran's nuclear weapons program. The answer to that question will ultimately determine the orientation of the Arab states toward Washington to a far greater extent than what happens with Israeli construction in Jerusalem.