Confirmed:
The White House has confirmed that Donald Trump's team is in the "beginning stages" of a plan to move the US embassy in Israel from [Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.] (typo fixed from original source)
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Trump will reportedly announce plans next week to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a move has been the stated goal of Trump’s advisors and appointees since December, when Conway described it as a “very big priority” and his top pick for US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, said he looks forward to serving "from the U.S. Embassy in Israel's eternal capital, Jerusalem."
Congress enacted a Jerusalem Embassy Law in 1995 but since then every president has used a rolling six month waver to avoid compliance with the legislation. Both Bill Clinton and Dubya advocated a US embassy move to Jerusalem but once elected they fell back to longstanding policy, and for good reason.
Such an explosively symbolic move will lay waste to any hope of a peaceful resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Saeb Erekat, Secretary General of the PLO, has warned
...if [Trump and Friedman] were to take these steps of moving the embassy and annexing settlements in the West Bank, [they] are sending this region down the path of something that I call chaos, lawlessness and extremism.
The move will assert the permanence of a single Israeli state, double down on settlements, and provoke further extremism in the region:
Opponents of the move, which seem to include some members of Israel’s own army and security apparatus, predict that moving the embassy could lead to an outbreak of violence in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in particular, and in the Arab and Muslim world as a whole. They also believe that a decision to move the embassy could harm both American and Israeli relations with moderate Arab states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s likely US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is an extremist on the Israeli political map far to the right of Netanyahu.
Based on statements he has issued and columns he has penned, Friedman, an Orthodox bankruptcy lawyer, is positioned on the far right of the Israeli political map – more hardline in his views than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Friedman’s views represent a burial of the US’s decades long goal of a two-state solution for the IP conflict, and far more:
He is president of the American fund-raising arm for a yeshiva in a settlement deep in the West Bank headed by a militant rabbi who has called for Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlers.
He writes a column for a right-wing Israeli news site in which he has accused President Obama of “blatant anti-Semitism,” dismissed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, likened a liberal American-Jewish group to “kapos” who cooperated with the Nazis, and said American Jewish leaders “failed” Israel on the Iran nuclear deal.
Look to Iran’s reaction to Trump’s embassy relocation. I suspect a Jerusalem US Embassy, aside from the proximate goal of hardliners to transform Israel into an apartheid state, to be a high stakes opening play in series of provocations designed to undermine the Iran nuclear deal and create a casus belli for a new American mideast military conquest. How this will sit with Putin, a putative ally of Iran, is an open question and may hold clues to to the extent of Trump’s fealty to the authoritarian Russian strongman.
Sunday, Jan 22, 2017 · 8:47:31 PM +00:00
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Subterra
Netanyahu Briefed on Scenarios of Violence Should Trump Move Embassy to Jerusalem
According to two senior Israel officials with knowledge of the consultations, Netanyahu and other officials at the meeting said Israel did not have definite information on whether or when Trump would announcement an embassy move. One official said Netanyahu had spoken by phone with Trump a number of times since his election, but as of the meeting he had not received a clear answer on the embassy.
This briefing may be the source of the reports that Trump is planning to move the embassy. I’ll leave the diary up because I think it’s vital to get people talking about this before Trump dumps it on the nation as a done deal.