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The Uphill Battle over Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem

(Jerusalem Post) David Parsons - It was Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.) who first started pushing for moving the U.S embassy to Jerusalem in the early 1980s. In 1995 I helped organize lobby days for several hundred Jewish and Christian activists to urge members of Congress to support a bill to move the embassy. The Clinton administration threatened to veto the bill, so the strategy focused on getting at least 67 co-sponsors in the Senate to demonstrate they could override a presidential veto. Sixty senators had signed on as co-sponsors. Eventually, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) came forward with a package deal offering to bring on 10 Democratic senators to make the bill veto-proof, but she insisted on adding a waiver authority giving the president power to suspend the bill's provisions every six months if he certified to Congress that it was in America's "national security interests." Feinstein's legislative assistant for foreign policy issues at that time was Dan Shapiro, later the U.S. ambassador to Israel. One excuse for nations to still refuse to move their embassies to Jerusalem is fear of the potentially violent Arab and Islamic response. This attitude of weakness is reflected in the way every U.S. president so far has exercised the waiver authority added at the last minute to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. This is not a policy based on principle, fairness or historical right, but solely on timidity, and it has effectively granted the Palestinians a veto over U.S. decision-making. The writer is vice president and senior spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.
2017-03-03 00:00:00
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