The NY Sun..
31 March '13..
Any week now the second most important federal court could hand down a decision in one of the most closely watched cases in the land — the one that centers on how our country refers to Jerusalem.
The case is Zivotofsky v. Secretary of State, in which an American child born in Jerusalem in 2002 is trying to get the state department to obey a law that requires it to give him a passport stating he was born in Israel.
Just a day before President Obama left on his trip to Jerusalem, lawyers for the child, Menachem Zivotofsky, who has been in court for a decade, were back for the latest round. It was in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has been ordered by the Supreme Court to step up and decide a case the State Department and the lower courts had been trying to label as too political for a judicial solution.
That didn’t deter the Obama administration from repeating the same warning it had given the Supreme Court: that any U.S. action signaling, symbolically or concretely, that the U.S. recognizes Jerusalem as part of Israel would jeopardize the “peace process.”
In oral argument before the D.C. Circuit on March 19, Master Zivotofsky’s lawyer, Nathan Lewin, began by noting that the administration’s invocation of a threat to the “peace process” was difficult to square with the manner in which President Obama’s latest trip was being described on the White House website:
“[T]he White House has issued a press release publicizing the trip to ‘Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan,’ and listing an itinerary that is almost entirely within the City of Jerusalem: meetings in Jerusalem with the President of Israel and Israel's Prime Minister, two overnight stays in the King David Hotel, a speech in the Jerusalem Convention Center, and visits to Mount Herzl, Yad Vashem, and the grave of former Prime Minister Rabin. It's hard to imagine any more symbolic and concrete official recognition of Jerusalem as being within Israel than the way the White House describes this trip by the President to prominent Jerusalem sites as a trip to Israel.”
It is not clear why the administration didn’t simply drop the case after the Supreme Court ruled Zivotofsky had a right to bring it. The case could have been resolved the way President Clinton treated the 1994 law that gave Taiwan-born Americans the right to have “Taiwan” on their passports instead of “People’s Republic of China.” Clinton faithfully executed the law, but announced U.S. “one China” policy would not change. President Obama could have done the same thing – apply the law to Zivotofsky’s passport but announce it signaled no change in U.S. foreign policy.
President Obama could even have blamed President George W. Bush in the process. In any event, it seems a bit disingenuous at this point to continue to assert that denying Master Zivotofsky his right under the 2002 law is necessary to preserve the “peace process.”
Last week, in his “Remarks to the People of Israel,” delivered in Jerusalem, Mr. Obama gave an eloquent description of Israel’s past and present:
“Over the last two days … I’ve borne witness to the ancient history of the Jewish people at the Shrine of the Book, and I’ve seen Israel’s shining future in your scientists and your entrepreneurs. This is a nation of museums and patents, timeless holy sites and ground-breaking innovation. Only in Israel could you see the Dead Sea Scrolls and the place where the technology on board the Mars Rover originated at the same time.”
The paragraph needed one more sentence: “And I am standing now in the city that was the capital of Israel more than 3,000 years ago and that is the capital of Israel today.” The sentence would have recognized an undeniable fact, while leaving the future of Jerusalem as a subject for final status negotiations, if the “peace process” ever resumes.
It would have also stood Mr. Obama in good stead given what it means to treat the future status of Jerusalem as an issue to be negotiated. On March 12, 1980, the New York Times printed a letter from Arthur J. Goldberg, who was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. when Resolution 242 was adopted. That resolution provides for an Israeli withdrawal from an unspecified portion of “territories” in exchange for secure and recognized borders, and the Roadmap designates Resolution 242 as the basis for final status negotiations. Goldberg wrote “to set the record straight”:
Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate. . . . In a number of speeches at the UN in 1967, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after 1948 were intended to be temporary. This, of course, was particularly true of Jerusalem. . . . I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable. In other words, Jerusalem was not to be divided again.
It has long been evident that the Palestinians (who have turned down three formal offers of a state over the last decade) do not seek a state so much as a reversal of history: they seek the 1967 lines to reverse the Six Day War, a “right of return” to reverse the 1948 one, and “East Jerusalem” because that portion of Jerusalem contains all of the Old City, illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967 and stripped of its Jewish presence until it was recovered by Israel.
The missing sentence from President Obama’s Jerusalem address would have helped further a true peace process, by signaling the Palestinians that no state is possible as long as they repeatedly deny the Jewish connection to the Old City of Jerusalem and repeatedly refuse to negotiate the status of Jerusalem as contemplated by UN Resolution 242.
There would have been no better occasion to make all these points than on a presidential trip to Jerusalem billed on the White House website as a trip to Israel, and no easier way than in the sentence President Obama should have added to his Jerusalem address.
Link: http://www.nysun.com/foreign/controversial-jerusalem-case-could-be-decided-any/88248/
Mr. Richman is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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