(CNSNews.com) – Contradicting a longstanding U.S. policy that irks many conservatives, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday identified Jerusalem’s location at least three times as being in Israel.
The apparent slip-ups came during Clinton’s first visit to the Israeli capital in two years, on the final day of a nine-country, 12-day trip.
Meeting with U.S. diplomatic staff and families at the U.S. consulate-general in Jerusalem, she said she was glad to see Consul General Daniel Rubinstein and his wife Julie, adding, “I got to work with Dan when he was in the White House, and it’s wonderful to see him in action here in Israel.”
Clinton used the same phrase when she greeted Defense Minister Ehud Barak at Jerusalem’s David Citadel hotel several hours later.
“Well, I am always pleased to have a chance to be here in Israel and to continue the conversations you and I have carried on over many years now, when we were both much younger,” she told Barak.
Later, opening a press conference at the same hotel shortly before flying home, Clinton declared herself “happy to be back in Israel.”
Those words – “here in Israel” and “back in Israel” – fly in the face of strict U.S. government policy not to state publicly that Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, is in fact located in Israel.
Like its Republican and Democratic predecessors, the Obama State Department does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the city, saying its future status remains to be determined in a negotiated peace settlement.
The U.S. policy applies even to western Jerusalem – parts of the city west of the 1949 armistice lines and so ostensibly not in dispute – as made clear by the administration’s stance in a legal case, brought on behalf of a young American born in Jerusalem, whose parents sought without success to have “Israel” given as place of birth on his passport.
Menachem Zivotofsky was born in a hospital in west Jerusalem, but State Department policy is that “U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem may not have ‘Israel’ listed in their passports as their place of birth.”
The Supreme Court last March sent Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State back to trial, saying in an 8-1 decision that it did not present a political question, as lower courts had asserted. The addition of the word “Israel” would only affect Zivotofsky’s official documentation, not U.S. Mideast policy.
The executive and legislative branches have long wrangled over the Jerusalem issue.
By large margins, both houses of Congress in 1995 passed a law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and instructing that the U.S. Embassy in Israel, located in Tel Aviv, should be moved to Jerusalem no later than May 1999.
An inbuilt waiver authority allowed the president to postpone the relocation for “national security” reasons for consecutive six-monthly periods, and they have done so ever since, most recently on June 1.
Many of the waiver notifications – particularly under President Obama – have been issued on Friday afternoons, a popular time for the “dumping” of material that tends to get less media attention. (Six of the seven waiver notifications issued by Obama to date have been on Fridays; four of President Bush’s 16 waivers were issued on Fridays; two of President Clinton’s four waivers were sent to Congress on Fridays.)
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/here-israel-jerusalem-clinton-breaches-us-policy
