U.S. Policy on Jerusalem

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U.S. Policy on Jerusalem
Jerusalem Special Report | Vol. SR No. 13 | Summer 2006

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U.S. Policy, Post-1967 War

The Johnson administration protested Israel’s effort to unilaterally change the city’s status even as it implicitly acknowledged Israel’s right to take “provisional” steps. Responding to the Knesset’s extension of Israeli law to an expanded East Jerusalem on June 28, 1967, the State Department noted that “the United States has never recognized such unilateral actions by any of the states in the area as governing the international status of Jerusalem.”

UN representative Arthur Goldberg explained on July 14, 1967, “I wish to make it clear that the United States does not accept or recognize these measures as altering the status of Jerusalem. . . . We insist that the measures taken cannot be considered as other than interim and provisional, and not as prejudging the final and permanent status of Jerusalem.”

President Richard Nixon’s UN Representative, Charles Yost, noted on July 1, 1969, “The pattern of behavior authorized under the Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and any changes must be necessitated by the immediate needs of the occupation. I regret to say that the actions of Israel in the occupied portion of Jerusalem present a different picture, one which gives rise to understandable concern that the eventual disposition of East Jerusalem may be prejudiced, and that the private rights and activities of the population are already being affected and altered.

“My Government regrets and deplores this pattern of activity, and it has so informed the Government of Israel on numerous occasions since June 1967. We have consistently refused to recognize those measures as having anything but a provisional character and do not accept them as affecting the ultimate status of Jerusalem. . . .

“I emphasize, as did Mr. Goldberg, that as far as the United States is concerned such unilateral measures, including expropriation of land or other administrative action taken by the Government of Israel, cannot be considered other than interim and provisional and cannot affect the present international status nor prejudge the final and permanent status of Jerusalem. The United States position could not be clearer.”

President Gerald Ford’s UN envoy, William Scranton, noted on March 23, 1976, “Clearly, then, substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, is illegal under the Convention and cannot be considered to have prejudged the outcome of future negotiations between the parties on the location of the borders of States of the Middle East. Indeed, the presence of these settlements is seen by my Government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace between Israel and its neighbors.”

By the end of President Jimmy Carter’s term, U.S. policy, despite its rhetorical opposition to Israel’s policy of annexation, had evolved to a position more closely resembling Israel’s. Washington emphasized the need to maintain Jerusalem’s “undivided” status. It focused on safeguarding the religious rights of all, while downplaying political challenges to Israeli sovereignty, and it continued to hold that Jerusalem’s final status could only be determined by negotiation.

Ronald Reagan noted in 1982 that “we remain convinced that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but its final status should be decided through negotiations.” In 1984 he stopped a move to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv by threatening to veto proposed legislation that would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Such opposition, however, was not meant to favor Arab claims to the city. Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, declared the establishment of Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem to be “unacceptable.”

President George H.W. Bush was more publicly critical of Israel’s settlement policies in the city than was Reagan, yet, Secretary of State James Baker conceded, that “Jews and others can live anywhere, in the western or eastern parts of the city, which will remain undivided.” The Bush administration did not revert to the pre-Reagan characterization of Israeli settlement activities as illegal, but Baker characterized settlement as “de facto annexation” and Bush once acknowledged East Jerusalem as “occupied territory.” For the first time, however, the U.S. agreed to the “natural growth” of the settlement population at an August 1992 meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The Clinton Administration

During the Clinton administration, opposition to Israel’s land confiscation and settlement activities in East Jerusalem waned to the point of indifference, including a refusal to characterize ongoing settlement construction in East Jerusalem as a “unilateral action” of the kind prohibited by the Oslo accords and that all previous administrations opposed as a matter of principle.

This “green light” to Israel’s policy of de facto annexation grew more pronounced in the wake of the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in September 1993. Administration officials argued that settlement construction and associated land expropriation in East Jerusalem should not be addressed by the UN Security Council, but rather were a bilateral concern of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The Clinton administration reiterated its defense of the policy supporting the “natural growth” of the settlement population, with the State Department spokesman noting that, “In the past, settlement activity has created a great deal of tension and it has been a complicating factor in the Middle East, and in relations between Israel and the Palestinians and others. We certainly believe that to be true. I think it’s also true that Israel and the Palestinians have decided to resolve this question, if they can, in the context of the final status talks. . . . So it’s up to them now to resolve that problem, but it has been a matter of tension and complication in the past.”

The Clinton parameters established during negotiations in 2000 broke with longstanding U.S. support for an open city. The parameters stated, “The general principle is that Arab areas are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Israeli. This would apply to the Old City as well. . . . The Palestinians would have sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif and Israelis would have sovereignty over the Western Wall and the “space sacred to Judaism of which it is a part.”

The George W. Bush Administration

The “road map” issued by the Bush administration in April 2003 defined the administration’s guidelines for a final status agreement and the eventual creation of two states. The plan required the Israeli government to halt settlement expansion, including accommodation for natural growth.

In an April 14, 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Bush noted, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.”

The importance of these understandings is that they suggest an unprecedented U.S. approval of Israel’s policy of settlement expansion, in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. Such intimate involvement and complicity in this policy marks another significant shift in U.S. policy, which until the administration of Jimmy Carter viewed all settlement activity, in including that in East Jerusalem, as illegal and a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.