WASHINGTON DC: Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden said he will keep the US Embassy in Jerusalem if he is elected president later this year.
This despite calling President Donald Trump’s decision to move the embassy from Tel Aviv “short-sighted and frivolous.”
In 1995, while a Delaware senator, Biden supported the Jerusalem Embassy Act, overwhelmingly adopted by both the Senate and the House, which recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, calling for the city to remain “undivided.”
But the law allowed the president to invoke and reissue a six-month waiver on “national security grounds.”
The waiver was repeatedly renewed by presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Trump signed the waiver in June 2017, before the Senate passed a resolution reaffirming the Jerusalem Embassy Act and calling on the president to abide by its provisions.
Trump then recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and ordered the relocation of the embassy, which was completed by May 2018.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and an informal advisor to Biden on defense matters, said revisiting the embassy question does not make sense.
“Reversing a move already made is in fact different than preferring to delay it in the first place,” O’Hanlon told Arab News. “I’m at a loss as to how the US can gain leverage over Israel in this day and age.”
Moving the embassy back to Tel Aviv “might not even be sustainable for a US president, since we could wind up toggling back and forth from one president to the next,” he said.
“I tend to agree with Biden: What’s done is done. But I’m also frustrated at America’s inability to persuade Israel to be reasonable on the peace process and two-state solution.”
During a virtual fundraiser, Biden said the embassy move should have happened in the context “of a larger deal to help us achieve important concessions for peace in the process,” reiterating his support for a “two-state solution.”
Even though Trump’s Middle East peace plan, released in January, paid lip service to a two-state solution, it gave Israel complete control of Jerusalem and the West Bank, allowing it to annex 30 percent of the Palestinian territories there. It also rejected the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
