WHY MOVE US EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM?: Michael I. Krauss & J. Peter Pham explain in an article for the National Review Online:

...Inexcusably, one of the parties feeding the deluded ambitions of Arab fantasists for the destruction of the Jewish State is none other than Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States. In a part of the world where symbolism is paramount, it is tragic that the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains in Tel Aviv on Hayarkon Street, quite literally on the beach, as if ready to be swept into the sea along with the state to which its diplomats are accredited. The profoundly insulting nature of the U.S.’s refusal to move its embassy to its host nation’s capital has been widely recognized by a broad bipartisan consensus of the U.S. Congress.

...Regrettably, despite an explicit campaign pledge, made before a meeting of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, to move the embassy to Jerusalem in compliance with the law, President George W. Bush has invoked the same waiver provision no fewer than ten times. His most recent evasion of the law occurred in a presidential memo dated December 18, 2006, that, incredibly, affirmed that the “Administration remains committed to beginning the process of moving our Embassy to Jerusalem.” The memo nonetheless determined “that it is necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States to suspend for a period of six months” the requirements of the Jerusalem Embassy Act.

What makes these waivers even more maddening is that, since 1989, the United States has leased — for $1 per year, renewable for 99 years — a 7.75 acre plot in southwestern Jerusalem, outside the walls of the liberated Old City, popularly known as the “Allenby tract.” America’s embassy in Jerusalem would therefore not be on “disputed” land, much less within the Old City. The Allenby tract is indisputably within the pre-1967 boundaries of the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.

Read the whole thing.

J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University. Michael I. Krauss is professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. Both are adjunct fellows of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Jerusalem and Jerusalem Embassy Act.