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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Sunday, June 4, 2017
Trump decides not to move US embassy to Jerusalem
As
a candidate, President Trump vowed at the Israel lobby group AIPAC’s
2016 conference that he would move the US embassy “to the eternal
capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” (Lorie Shaull)
Donald Trump reversed himself Thursday – again – and signed the
Jerusalem Embassy Act waiver as all his predecessors have done every six
months since the bill was originally passed during the Clinton
administration.
The president had promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign to move the embassy, telling a
roaring crowd at the Israel lobby AIPAC, “We will move the American
embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”
In 1995 Congress passed the law requiring that the US embassy be
relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but in a compromise enabled the
president to delay the move every six months on national security grounds.
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Trump all
regularly renewed the waiver for fear of the potentially destabilizing
effects on the region of moving the embassy.
“Ultimate deal”
The White House insisted Thursday that “the question is not if that move happens, but only when.”
It explained the president’s decision to defer the move for the
foreseeable future as necessary to “maximize the chances of successfully
negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Trump, a hardliner on Israel during the presidential campaign, has reportedly become enamored with the idea of striking the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians.
His would-be peace negotiators, presidential assistant Jason Greenblatt and adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, are staunch supporters of Israel and its settlement enterprise, as is David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel.
Trump himself has sent mixed signals on whether he supports two states or one and has not indicated whether his vision of one state looks more like apartheid or upholds equal rights and voting rights for all.
“Embarrassing climb down”
Ethnonationalist advocates for Israel took exception to Trump signing the waiver and The New York Timesspeculated that major Republican funder and donor to anti-Palestinian causes Sheldon Adelson would be upset with the decision.
Democrats also expressed support for moving the embassy. Congressional
Israel Allies Caucus co-chair, New York representative Eliot Engel, not
only backed the move but
implicitly embraced the idea of a Jerusalem ethnically cleansed of
Palestinians. “The American embassy,” he said, “belongs in the Jewish
capital of Jerusalem.”
Josh Ruebner, policy director with the US Campaign for Palestinian
Rights, told The Electronic Intifada that Trump’s decision amounted to
“an embarrassing climb down from his fervently expressed campaign pledge
to move the US embassy to Jerusalem expeditiously.”
Republicans and Democrats alike have lent their support to 50 years of
Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem.
Ruebner pointed to the fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
a Republican, has joined forces with Tammy Baldwin, an ostensibly
progressive Democrat, to back a resolution that not only demands the
embassy be moved, “but celebrates a half-century of Israeli military
occupation of East Jerusalem while ignoring Israel’s violations of
international law there and its separate-and-unequal regime which
discriminates against Palestinian Jerusalemites.”
That resolution – S.Res.176 – will be brought to a vote on 5 June, coinciding with the anniversary of the start of the war in which Israel militarily occupied East Jerusalem.
Myth of “united” Jerusalem
Congressional Republicans and Democrats have simply decided to look the
other way as Palestinian rights are violated – or, in some cases, to
minimize or explain away such violations as understandable.
“This Act is based on the myth of a united Jerusalem, but the actual
Jerusalem could not be more divided, physically, economically, socially
and politically,” Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish
Voice for Peace, told The Electronic Intifada, noting that Palestinians
in the city face systematic Israeli violence and discrimination.
This includes denial of their residency rights, grossly unfair distribution of resources, home demolitions, forced displacement and property seizure by Jewish settlers, collective punishment and other measures by an Israel determined to ensure that Jews hold a majority.
Illegal
In contrast to the zealous congressional support for Israel’s positions, the UN Security Council reaffirmed in
December that all of Israel’s measures “aimed at altering the
demographic composition, character and status” of the Palestinian
territories occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal.
Astonishingly, Trump’s grand vision of succeeding where all other
presidents have failed has led him to embrace a discredited “peace
process” over explicit support for Israel’s theft and colonization of
Palestinian land.
How long his “moderation” will last is anyone’s guess.
As with so much else in his presidency, the policy could be dramatically
reversed at any juncture, the embassy moved and the peace process
dismissed in favor of publicly embracing the supercharged settlement and
colonization that Israel is carrying on with anyway.