The White House engaged in two puerile gambits last week that exposed the Obama administration’s amateurish and deceitful Middle East policies in a painfully obvious manner.
The first case concerned the thorny issue of Jerusalem’s legal status in American law. In 1947, the United Nations ruled the holy city to be a corpus separatum (Latin for “separated body”) and not part of any state. All these years later and despite many changes, U.S. policy continues to hold this to be Jerusalem’s status. This ignores that the government of Israel declared western Jerusalem to be its capital in 1950 and the whole of Jerusalem in 1980. The executive branch even ignores U.S. laws from 1995 (requiring a move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) and 2002 (requiring that U.S. documents recognize Americans born in Jerusalem to be born in Israel). Instead, it insists that the city’s disposition must be decided through diplomacy.
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