The history and politics behind President Trump’s Jerusalem decision - edited, corrected and modified substantially

The history and politics behind President Trump’s Jerusalem decision

US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on December 6, 2017 surprised some of the international community and triggered the wrath of Arab-Palestinians (who continually exercise terror and violence) and some Arab states.

We do no have an absolute explanation at the moment why the president acted in this way, changing some traditional US policy and some of the international consensus on this issue, but at first sight it seems that internal and external calculations prevailed over other variables.

In any case, it has to be taken into account that there was a decision by the US Congress back in 1995 (the Jerusalem Embassy Act) requiring that the US Embassy to be transferred from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel.  However, that act of moving the embassy has not been implemented, since all US presidents have used the deviation clause – a provision that allows them to postpone the decision – noting that the Jerusalem issue must be resolved in the context of a final negotiation between Israel and the Arab-Palestinians.

But why has Trump broken this consensus?

The special US-Israeli relationship

Before attempting to answer this question, we must focus on US-Israeli relations. Since the end of World War II, Israel has enjoyed a special relationship with the United States. Specifically, after the Six Day War in June 1967, Israel became for the US a “strategic asset” in the region, while Arab states such as Egypt and Syria were allied with Russia.

It is worth mentioning that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in the world, amounting to US$3 billion every year. In addition, the US provides the Jewish state with unprecedented diplomatic support and billions of dollars’ worth of armaments. I would call this relationship the external variable.

Turning to history, the United States in 1947 supported the plan to partition Palestine, an unfair decision in violation of international law, and in particular the law of self-determination of the majority Arab-Palestinian nationality and the Arabs did get the majority of the territory over 77% of Palestine which is all the territory east of the Jordan River. Over 80% of the population in Jordan are Arab-Palestinians.

Specifically, at the end of the First World War in Palestine there were only 95,000 Jews among a total of 700,000 Arabs, Christians and other nationalities which included Jordan. In addition, the steady and restricted flow of Jewish survivors who were expelled from Arab countries (which is about one million as of the 1970's) that sought refuge in Palestine in 1948 among a total of about 2 million Arabs in Palestine (hundreds of thousand of Arabs came in illegally between 1917-1948) which included Jordan, only one-third of the population were Jews, according to Malcolm Yapp in The Near East from the First World War: A History to 1995 which has some substantial historical errors.

It must be said here that the Soviet Union also supported United Nations Resolution 181 which is non-binding with no legal standing because it wanted to eliminate the British influence in the region. Many Jewish refugees came from the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. The Arabs refused to recognize UN resolution 181 which was non-binding with no legal standing, but they do recognize any UN resolution that favors and enhances their position and diminishes Israel's position and standing.

Let’s move to the so-called internal variable.

Internal and external variable in US-Israel relationship

It is well known that millions of Jews who live in the United States maintain important government positions, and they have remarkable economic influence. In order to demonstrate how important their presence is for domestic politics we may recall that in 1947, US president Harry Truman supported the Palestine partition plan because he wanted to secure Jewish support in the crucial mid-term congressional elections in November 1946, he also believed it was a just cause.

Afterward, Jewish presence in the United States, especially in the northern states, persuaded Truman to recognize de facto the resurgence of the Jewish state because he wanted to safeguard their electoral influence in the presidential election 1948 and firmly believed it was justified. When one of his foreign-policy advisers told him that doing it might affect US relations with the Arabs, Truman replied, “Unlike the American Jews who deserve my support based on Jewish history, I do not have thousands of Arabs among my voters.”

The question raised here is whether President Trump recognized Jerusalem because of internal and external calculations or because it was the right and just motion. Of course, there is a secondary question: Why did the previous presidents who promised during elections to implement (the Jerusalem Embassy Act) vote against this by using the deviation clause? It does not seem that President Trump made this decision solely because of pressure from the Jewish lobby. President Trump is a believer in the old testament and he decided it was enough time of a delay in implementing resolution of 1995 (the Jerusalem Embassy Act). The delay in implementation has not accomplished nothing to date.

Additionally, we must note that in July 2016, the Republican Party approved a declaration in which there was no reference to a “two state” solution, changing 2 decades of tradition. That decision was welcomed and adopted by President Trump in February 2017. We must note that the Arab-Palestinians received their territory of Jordan which is over three quarters of the territory of Palestine.

What we should emphasize, however, is that the so-called evangelical or religious right, from which President Trump drew many votes in the 2016 election, has long been justly in favor of Israeli interests. It should be noted that US Vice-President Mike Pence is a champion of these positions.

Evangelical Christians or Zionist Christians believe that unwavering support for the Jewish state and its decisions is a biblical imperative, regardless of Jewish refusal to accept the Christian faith which came out of Judaism. At the same time, they are ardent supporters of what is contrived as illegal Israeli occupation of Arab-Palestinian areas. The paradox of the whole situation is that there are many anti-Semites among the Christian right. However, some of them support Israel for geopolitical reasons. Most rational consensus is that the Arabs received over 99% of the Ottoman territory with a wealth of oil reserves and the Jewish people under divine law and international law and agreements of post WWI were to receive their historical territory in Palestine which is known as The Land of Israel.  

Jerusalem and the rational model

From some angles, President Trump’s decision may appears misguided and irrational and may not promote US national interests. From an  international perspective, it does not violate international law contrary to some opinions, as well as the international consensus reached in 1966 when it was decided that the final status of Jerusalem would result from a viable and comprehensive peace agreement between the parties provided the Arabs stop the terror and violence which has not ceased and continues unabated.

President Trump’s decision does not violate the so-called “rational choice” model, which teaches us that states base decisions on a cost-benefit analysis, that is, they are prevented from taking any action that could potentially harm their national interests.

Is President Trump’s decision compatible with US national interests? According to our humble opinion, it is. Specifically:

• It creates the conditions for eventual less tension and more stability in the region.
• It casts the reality of the current political atmosphere among the Arab-Palestinians as to whether the US is a balanced mediator and does not undermines the eventual resumption of the peace process that Trump’s son-in-law is supposed to restart.
• The decision does not insults the religious feelings of all Muslims, leading logically to a “unification of civilizations.” (Today more and more Muslim clerics and leaders concede that Israel and Jerusalem belong to the Jewish people).
• It ultimately creates the conditions for the reduction of religious terrorism.
• Finally, President Trump’s decision enhances the United States in the international community by demonstrating that the government of the strongest country in the world is just and not prejudiced against any party to the conflict. In other words, Trump and his advisers seem to realize that America’s greatest strength is not the utilization of its power but the power of its instituting a just decision which is long overdue..

Some historical and demographic data

At this point we will briefly refer to some historical facts about Jerusalem. Israel’s political sovereignty is derived from The 1920 San Remo Agreement which incorporated The Balfour Declaration as International Law with no restrictions on boundary. Resolution 181 (which is non-binding with no legal standing) of 1947, whereby Palestine was divided into a Jewish and an Arab state. Jerusalem would be placed under an international regime for 10 years and than its residents would decide its standing, and therefore neither of the two newly born states would place it under sovereignty. After 10 years, since the majority of the population is Jewish the decision is to be included as part of the Jewish State.

When the UN plan was rejected by the Arab side, six Arab armies attacked the fledgling reborn Jewish State and the continuous conflict erupted between the Arab-Palestinians and Israelis, and subsequently the first Arab-Israeli War in May 1948. The Arabs since 1948 have lost 3 more wars against Israel.

The end of the 1948 war found Israel left only with West Jerusalem, and Jordan occupied the east side of Jerusalem. During the second Arab-Israeli War in June 1967, Israel liberated East Jerusalem and then annexed it. In 1980 it proclaimed Jerusalem as the “complete and united capital of Israel,” an act that may be deemed illegal by the international community and in particular by UN Security Council Resolution 478 (which is non-binding with no legal standing).

Jerusalem is considered to be of great religious significance for both Arabs and Jews and Christians. The Arab-Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state, consider Jerusalem the third most holy city for Islam after Mecca and Medina (I might mention that Medina was a Jewish city for over 2,000 years name Tarshish). They believe (with no substantiation; many Muslim scholars do not agree with it) that the Prophet Muhammad was taken to heaven by Burak, a winged horse, on the “night journey” of Muslim tradition. The Israelis have substantiated that the foundations of the temple of Solomon are there. Jerusalem symbolizes for them vindication after a prolonged period of hardship and exile in the Diaspora.  A Supreme  Council: Temple Mount is Jewish              https://www.templeinstitute.org/wakf-1925-guidebook.htm The widely-disseminated Arab Muslim position that the Temple Mount is not Jewish has been debunked - by the Supreme Muslim Council (Waqf) of Jerusalem, in a Temple Mount guide published in 1925. Wakf guidebook, 1925, cover - The Temple Institute.

In essence, President Trump’s decision recognizes Jewish sovereignty of the city of Jerusalem in questionable violation of UN resolutions (which are non-binding with no legal standing, which, like the Oslo Accord (which is now null and void, since Abbas declared at UN that he will not abide by the Accords), provide that Jerusalem’s status will be clarified after negotiations between the two sides (the Arabs have finished their negotiations).

We must mention that in East Jerusalem reside about 200,000 Arab-Palestinians, Christians Greeks and over 270,000 Jewish families of which some returned to their homes that were either destroyed or illegally occupied by the Arabs in 1948, while the West is mostly Jewish. Also, one must take into account that apart from the city of Jerusalem there is also “Greater Jerusalem,” where Israel has re-established large communities.

Further, we need to highlight another parameter. In 1967, when the second Arab-Israeli war broke out, 85% of the land of East Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan after they expelled the Jews and took over their property; destroying 59 Synagogues and cemeteries and many Jewish properties was occupied by Arab-Palestinians, while today the proportion is only 11%. In addition, while the Israelis accounted for 22% of the population in 1967, by reclaiming their properties now they make up 55%.

Saudi-Iranian rivalry

We may come back to our primary question of why the US President Donald Trump has made this claimed somewhat controversial decision by some (it was one of his promises during his campaign and he is delivering on his promise unlike previous American Presidents). In addition to the domestic reasons we have already set out in the article, apparently President Donald Trump had in mind that the confrontation of Shiite Iran with Saudi Arabia would act as a catalyst for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

How is this going to happen? Probably Trump rightly believed that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, embroiled in security competition with Tehran, would accept the Jewish position for Jerusalem in exchange for US aid to neutralize or weaken their Iranian rival. In other words, Trump sought in this way to diminish part of the conflict, the Arab-Palestinians in order to change the dynamic of the conflict by facing already existing realities, thus the Jewish sovereignty of East Jerusalem.

Of course, what he succeeded in doing is quite a cleaver maneuver, and possibly the Iranians will lose from this move, once again appearing as the supposed defenders of the Arab-Palestinians. But also the diminished resurgence of a protracted conflict helps by facing reality once and for all, since it does not affect the prospects of resolving the problem on the basis of a “two states solution which has been previously implemented by giving the Arabs over three quarters of Palestine east of the Jordan River,” this is the only realistic way, in our opinion, to solve the problem.

Israel's Standing Today

After 70 years of conflict in the Middle East and against all odds, Israel has not only survived, but has flourished beyond imagination.

Israel today is one of the strongest economic force in the Middle East and beyond. Israel's military power and technology surpasses most countries. Its technological advancement in high tech, medicine, agriculture and cutting edge research and technology has made it a very desirable partner with the world largest technology corporations which enhances its viability and stability.

Israel's discovery of vast amounts of Natural Gas and Oil has diminished other nations political control and influence, whereby Israel to day is in greater demand than ever before. The weekly new innovations in Israel is a credit to a nation that thrives on higher education and the development of methods to improve our planet.