Jerusalem, Israel
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Thursday that US passports of Americans born in Jerusalem can – if the parents so desire – now have Israel listed as the country of birth. This move came just a day after a ceremony in Ariel where restrictions on US federal investments beyond the Green Line were lifted.
Those back- to- back steps had some in Jerusalem quipping that it is a shame that every day is not five days before a US presidential election.
The timing of both moves can be explained in one of two ways, though these two explanations are by no means mutually exclusive.
In the first telling, US President Donald Trump is hoping that these steps will play well with Evangelical Christians whom he needs to come out to the polls in record numbers on Tuesday if he is to have any chance of being re- elected.
In the second explanation, these steps are the fruits of efforts by strong pro- Israel officials within the administration, first and foremost US ambassador David Friedman, to shoehorn in as much unfinished business related to Israel as possible while there is a very sympathetic and positively disposed president toward Israel in the Oval Office.
In other words, take care of these types of issues now, because Trump may soon be leaving the White House and then who knows what tomorrow will bring.
The truth is that mandating that only “Jerusalem’’ can be written in the passports of Americans born there – the situation until today– is an anomaly that should have been corrected long ago. We applaud that it is finally being done now.
Explanations given by the US in the past for an unwillingness to connect Jerusalem – any part of Jerusalem – to Israel in passports revolved primarily around the idea that the status of Jerusalem in the eyes of most countries, is still pending, and that this is a hot- button issue that needs to be determined in Israeli- Palestinian negotiations. The US, according to this argument, did not want to prejudice the outcome of future negotiations by taking a stand on the issue.
But that argument was disingenuous, because what about Jerusalem before 1967, before Israel repelled the Jordanian attack during the Six Day War and gained control of the entire city, east and west.
Why could Israel not be Jerusalem’s designated state in US passports before the Six Day War, when Israel only had control of the western part of the city?
The reason: because the US never formally relinquished its support for UN resolutions dating to the Partition Plan in 1947 calling for the city to be designated as a “corpus separatum’’ – a city with a special status to be placed under an international regime. Washington’s clinging on, at least formally, to the “corpus separatum” idea only really ended in 2018 when Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, in accordance with a 1995 US law.
The long- standing American refusal to acknowledge in passports that any part of Jerusalem was an integral part of Israel spoke of a belief, or even a hope, that it was not. This reinforced the pernicious notion – an idea propagated by Palestinian propaganda and which gained traction in recent years, and was even incorporated in the resolutions of various UN bodies – that Israel had no valid historical tie or claim to the Holy City. It was high time to put that idea to rest.
The US Supreme Court had the opportunity to do so in 2015, when it ruled on a case brought by Ari Zivotofsky to force the State Department to list “Jerusalem, Israel” as the place of birth for his son, Menachem, in conformity with a 2002 law passed by Congress. But the court missed the opportunity, ruling that the president, not Congress, has the sole authority to make these types of foreign policy decisions and the court struck down the law.
That being the case, once Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy there in 2018, it should have been just a matter of time for the State Department to change its procedures on this matter as well. These types of ingrained policies, apparently, are not easy to reverse, and it took over two years for this to happen.
To which we can only say: It’s about time.
Any starting point for future talks regarding the status of the city must acknowledge its unbreakable connection to the Jewish people and its designation as the capital of Israel. Pompeo’s announcement just made those indisputable facts more concrete.