President
Trump will announce around midday on Wednesday that he is formally
recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and directing the State
Department to begin the process of building a future U.S. Embassy there,
ushering in a sea change in American policy and potentially roiling the
Muslim world.
Concurrently,
he will sign the semi-annual waiver that, under U.S. law, permits him
to keep the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv for the next six months without
triggering drastic cuts to State Department operations spending.
And
he will lay out his new position in a way that does not preclude the
possibility that Palestinians could establish a capital in East
Jerusalem, occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.
The
description of Trump’s plans was given by several sources inside and
outside the Trump administration, all of whom requested anonymity and
strongly cautioned that the president’s decision — and schedule — could
undergo an 11th-hour shift.
Hours
after Yahoo News first reported the outlines of Trump’s speech, the
White House held a briefing in which senior officials confirmed this
account. “The president is affirming a reality — a historic and current
reality,” one official said.
Ahead
of the announcement, Trump phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas, and Jordan’s King
Abdullah II. Abbas and Abdullah, through their offices, warned Trump
that his decision to recognize Jerusalem would cripple hopes for Middle
East peace, and risks inflaming anti-U.S. sentiment in the Muslim world.
Many questions about Trump’s policy shift remain. Here are five things to watch for in the speech.
Will there be a precise timetable for moving the embassy?
News
accounts of Trump’s phone calls to world leaders on Tuesday described
him as saying he “intends” to move the U.S. Embassy. Without a
timetable, even an aspirational one rather than a firm date, “intends”
means that the president would be just restating U.S. policy.
A 1995 U.S. law requires the United States to move its embassy to Jerusalem
but gives presidents the power to delay it in six-month increments.
Trump, like his predecessors, promised on the campaign trail to move the
embassy — but once in office, put off the decision.
But
the sources who spoke to Yahoo News said Trump would direct U.S.
diplomats, probably led by U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, to
begin the process of surveying possible sites, and hiring builders and
contractors. Some of the sources said the president would express his
hope that the embassy would open during his term of office, without
setting a hard date either for the groundbreaking or the completion of
the project. (Friedman, in a statement announcing his nomination, said
he looked forward to working “from the U.S. Embassy in Israel’s eternal
capital, Jerusalem.”)
In
the White House briefing, which was held on condition that none of the
speakers be identified by name, one senior administration official told
reporters that Trump “is not going to set a timetable.”
Another
top U.S. official said that “as a practical matter, no embassy is
constructed today anywhere in the world in shorter than three to four
years. No embassy. And that’s to meet the necessary requirements for
security, resiliency, safety and simple accommodation of the staff.
That’s going to be the case here as well.”
The officials said Trump would sign a waiver every six months until the embassy opens — unless Congress changes the law.
In
practice, the city already serves as Israel’s capital, and while no
other state has an embassy there, the U.S. ambassador frequently works
and stays in the city.
What will Trump say about the Palestinians?
Observers
of Middle East politics and diplomacy will be listening closely to
Trump’s speech to detect whether he refers to “West Jerusalem” when he
recognizes Israel’s capital.
He
probably won’t. That’s significant because the Palestinians have said
that they want the capital of their hypothetical future state to be in
East Jerusalem. Two sources said Trump would leave it to aides to tell
reporters that his announcement does not preclude that.
U.S.
policy has been to regard the dispute as one of the “final status”
issues to be determined in Middle East peace negotiations, not
unilaterally.
Israel
has claimed Jerusalem as its undivided capital since 1950 and supports
moving the U.S. Embassy there. Moving the embassy would effectively
ratify the Israeli claim, risking an angry response from Muslim allies.
The
CIA’s World Factbook says this under the entry for Israel’s capital:
“Jerusalem: note — while Israel proclaimed Jerusalem as its capital in
1950, the international community does not recognize it as such; the
U.S., like all other countries, maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv-Yafo.”
(At the State Department, the page that normally would include such
details has carried a “currently being updated” note for most of 2017.)
Two
congressional sources told Yahoo News that they expect Trump to take a
hard line on the Palestinians, insisting that they end a policy that
pays the surviving family members of suicide bombers — a practice
denounced in the U.S. Congress as “pay to slay.”
How will key allies, inside the Muslim world and beyond, react?
Key
allies like Jordan and Saudi Arabia have publicly warned Trump against
unilaterally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. France and
Germany have done so as well. NATO member Turkey has warned it could even cut ties with Israel in response.
Privately,
U.S. officials have been playing down the potential backlash. One
central feature of their argument is that Iran’s resurgence in the
aftermath of the death of arch-enemy Saddam Hussein and the signing of
the nuclear deal with major world powers including the United States now
dwarfs the Israel-Palestinian question in the minds of major Middle
East leaders. They note that the region is defined now by the rivalry
between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and while public Saudi criticism is
certain, they suggest that the private message from Riyadh is more
conciliatory.Palestinians
in the West Bank protest President Trump’s decision to move the U.S.
Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2017. (Photo: Mahmoud Illean/AP)
But
Turkey’s robust denunciation of the plan, and the volatile situation in
countries like nuclear-armed Pakistan, raise questions about whether
that perspective will hold.
And
another concern is potential public anger in Jordan, a key U.S. ally,
where a majority of the population is Palestinian and which has
struggled under the strain of hosting some 650,000 refugees from Syria’s
civil war.
“We’re
obviously concerned about the protection of U.S. citizens, U.S.
officials anywhere in the world, including the Middle East,” one of the
senior officials said at the White House briefing.
What will Trump say about Middle East peace?
Recent
news reports have said the Trump administration is poised to unveil its
plan for Middle East peace sometime in the next few months — an elusive
timetable for one of the heaviest lifts in global affairs.
Trump
tapped his son-in-law Jared Kushner for the job, backed by Friedman and
by Jason Greenblatt, whom Trump designated as a special diplomatic
envoy. In February, after talks with Netanyahu, Trump dropped the
two-decade-old U.S. demand for a “two-state solution” — separate Jewish
and Palestinian nations side by side — for the region. Trump now views
that as one option among several.
One
recurring warning from Muslim countries ahead of the Jerusalem speech
has been that recognizing Israel’s claim to Jerusalem means that
Washington can no longer be a broker for peace. It’s not clear how Trump
will connect the two matters, though two U.S. officials suggested that
he would respond by saying that not recognizing Jerusalem has not helped
to usher in a peace deal.
Trump
“remains committed to achieving a lasting peace agreement between the
Israelis and the Palestinians and is optimistic that peace can be
achieved,” a senior U.S. official said in the White House briefing.
“Delaying the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has done
nothing to achieve peace.”
But
the officials could not say how recognition would advance the
long-stalled peace process, or name a single U.S. ally (other than
Israel) that supports the move.
Will Trump benefit politically at home?
Trump’s evangelical base will be thrilled. And the White House is making the most of that.
“This
is good news. This is big news. This is a prophesy coming to pass. I
mean the top three reasons why we as Christians and evangelicals voted
for Donald Trump was the Supreme Court, abortions and obviously,
pro-Israel, pro-Israel beliefs,” Pastor Mark Burns, a Trump surrogate in
the 2016 campaign, told Yahoo News.
Trump sits at historic lows in public opinion polls, though his core supporters seem to be sticking by him.
“I’ve
been asked, and other leaders have been asked, to prepare statements in
preparation for this announcement because obviously there’s going to be
a big stir up, huge stir, obviously those who are enemies of the
administration are going to go crazy,” Burns said.
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