On Friday morning, President Donald Trump explained his Jerusalem announcement in one fiery tweet that mocked former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama for not keeping their promises on the issue.
“I fulfilled my campaign promise — others didn’t,” the president tweeted, along with a video montage.
The video shows Clinton, Bush, and Obama — as candidates — promising to recognize Jerusalem as the formal capital city of Israel. Each of those presidents broke that promise, Trump’s tweet suggested.
Israel took control of the entire city of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War. The country had formally declared the city its capital in 1949, but no foreign nation has opened an embassy there.
In 1989, Israel began leasing to the U.S. a plot of land in Jerusalem as the location of a new embassy. The 99-year lease cost $1 per year, and the land remains empty to this day. In 1995, Congress passed a law requiring America to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Since 1995, every president declined to move the embassy, citing national security (America’s position in the region). Every six months, the president has waived the embassy move.
Six months ago, the U.S. Senate voted 90-0 to move the embassy to Jerusalem. The last four Democratic Party platforms have also advocated the move. As the Washington Free Beacon’s Matt Continetti asked, “Were we to take seriously neither these platforms nor that vote? Was it all virtue-signaling, a bunch of empty gestures in the kabuki theater of U.S. diplomacy?”
President Trump kept his promise, and the media has threatened violence because of it. While Trump has not said when the U.S. Embassy will be moved to Jerusalem, his formal recognition of the city as Israel’s capital suggests this further more is likely to come soon.
As for the violence, the terrorist group Hamas has already called for a second uprising — Intifada — against Israel. There have been protests, and one 30-year-old Palestinian was killed. The protests may or may not continue.
However, most of the Arab countries in the region are more concerned with one another (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in particular), and likely will only make rhetorical attacks on the decision.
Even if Trump’s decision causes violence, he was just keeping his promise — a promise decades in the making.
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I fulfilled my campaign promise – others didn’t! pic.twitter.com/bYdaOHmPVJ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2017
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