Donald Trump’s plan to move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be a “game changer”, according to diplomats, as senior Palestinian officials warn that the move could provoke regional violence.
Criticised by international legal experts, analysts and former senior US officials, the proposal has heightened concern over what the president-elect’s policies would mean for an already moribund Israel-Palestine peace process and the future of a two-state solution.
In recent days, potential officials with the incoming administration have repeatedly made clear Trump’s desire to relocate the embassy early in his presidency.
That has included remarks by senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and David Friedman, the controversial pro-Israel hardliner Trump has nominated to be his new ambassador to Israel. Friedman said last week he looked forward to serving in Jerusalem.
And following Trump’s nomination of Friedman, the president-elect’s transition team spokesman, Jason Miller, again reiterated the issue in a briefing for reporters. “This is a commitment that the president-elect made numerous times on the campaign trail, that he remains firmly committed to.”
The US embassy has been housed in a modernist concrete cube on Tel Aviv’s HaYarkon Street since the 1960s. Moving to Jerusalem would mark a reversal of almost seven decades of US policy that has until now decreed that the final status of Jerusalem, whose eastern – and largely Arab – side has been occupied by Israel since 1967, should be determined in peace talks with the Palestinians.
In recent days, however, an escalating war of words has erupted between Israeli and Palestinian officials, and others, over the potential consequences of moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
On Tuesday evening, Israel’s ambassador to the US weighed in. Ron Dermer, a rightwing figure close to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long had a cool relationship with the Obama administration, described the move of the embassy as a “great step forward to peace”, denying it would inflame tensions in the region.
But his comments follow remarks by Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and peace negotiator, who warned in answer to a question from the Guardian on Friday that moving the embassy to Jerusalem would result in the “destruction of the peace process as a whole”.
Speaking at a gathering of journalists following the nomination of Friedman as Trump’s pick for ambassador, Erekat added: “If you were to take these steps, of moving the embassy, annexing settlements in the West Bank – you are sending this region down the path of something that I call chaos, lawlessness and extremism.”
During the traditional lighting of Hanukah candles at Israel’s embassy in Washington on Tuesday, Derner said the move “should have happened a long time ago” and added he believed the relocation would “send a strong message against the delegitimisation of Israel”.
Both George W Bush and Bill Clinton made similar promises during their campaigns, and in 1994 Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act which explicitly calls for relocation. But successive presidents have refrained from moving the embassy out of concern over the potential ramifications for US diplomacy in the Middle East.
Trump’s most definitive statement on the issue came in the middle of the election campaign.
“We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem – and we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel,” he said to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) lobbying group.
If there is a difference with his predecessors, it is that Trump’s team has shown no signs of backing down on that commitment, instead emphasising it as a key foreign policy objective.
To some, that has suggested the influence of his advisers on an Israel-Palestine issue is dominated by his son-in-law Jared Kushner – whose family charity has given money to one of the West Bank’s most hardline settlements, Yitzhar – and Friedman, who has raised money for another hardline settlement.
“We were told by US officials that Kushner and Friedman are the ones who are advising Trump on the Israel-Palestinian issue,” said one Palestinian official.
If Palestinians are alarmed by the issue, US officials dealing with the Israel-Palestine question appear equally concerned over what the implications of such a sharp policy U-turn might be.
“It’s not a question of bricks and mortar,” said one, speculating, as others have, that the move could be accomplished easily by re-signing the large US consulate in Jerusalem. “It is a question of policy.”
In the wider diplomatic community, the move is seen as a “game changer” and one with multiple risks attached despite Dermer’s reassurances, including the risk of renewed violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
If the change in policy itself is one concern, another has been the way in which it has been articulated in such ad hoc fashion by Trump advisers.
Dan Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Egypt and Israel and now an academic,described his surprise at Friedman’s breach with state department protocols.
“The president hasn’t been sworn in yet, the secretary of state hasn’t spoken about this, and [Friedman’s] already talking about the policy he is going to change. This is unheard of,” said Kurtzer.
But despite all this, Trump associates have not said when a move might happen.
Trump’s spokesman Miller has avoided the issue, and while it appears the practical and policy implications have been discussed by US officials in Jerusalem, it seems no concrete steps are likely to be made until after Trump’s inauguration next month.
If Friedman is guiding Trump’s policy on Israel and Palestine, he has already set up the conditions for confrontation with the US state department over the issue.
In a speech in October to Trump supporters in Jerusalem – before his nomination as ambassador – Friedman made his views clear, accusing state department officials of “antisemitism”.
“The lifers in the state department are absolutely, positively committed to never moving the embassy to Jerusalem. What’s different about Donald Trump? You all know Donald Trump. If there is anybody in the world politics who could stand up to the state department it is Donald Trump.
“When Donald Trump has his first meeting with the lifers in the state department and they say: ‘Mr Trump, with all due respect, you have only been president for a couple of days, we’ve been living here for the last 20 years, we don’t do it that way, we do it this way, we don’t move the embassy, that’s been state department policy for 20 years’ – the reaction from Donald Trump is going to be, ‘You know what, guys? You’re all fired!’”
All of which has left Palestinian officials such as Erekat holding on to the faintest of hopes: that some US institutions will put a brake on the issue.
“We will see, will he do it? I don’t think they will do it,” Erekat told journalists. “I think the United States, at the end of the day, is a country of institutions and they’re guided by their veteran interests, and not the interests, I believe, of this person or that person,” Erekat said.
If the move does occur, however, other Palestinian officials have warned they will fight the move in the UN, including the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour.
“If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which is a violation of security council resolutions, it is a violation of resolution 181 of the UN general assembly that was drafted by the US … it means they are showing belligerency towards us,” Mansour said. “If they do that, nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the UN to defend ourselves, and we have a lot of weapons in the UN.”