Obama-Netanyahu Round II: Jerusalem

This weekend's controversy over the construction of apartments on the site of the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem has reignited the sensitive issue of expanding Israeli neighborhoods in the traditionally Arab quarter of the city. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu used the hotel to confront President Barack Obama's settlement policy as it relates to the holy city. Nonetheless, President Obama has remained firm in his demand for a complete freeze on all settlement expansion.

Contested Jerusalem

The controversy is yet another chapter in the long and contentious struggle over Jerusalem. Between the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967, Jerusalem was a divided city between Eastern and Western sectors under Jordanian and Israeli control. The international community viewed the status of the city as in dispute, to be resolved in negotiations.

Following Jordanian shelling of Israeli West Jerusalem, Israeli forces invaded and took control of East Jerusalem, cementing Israeli control over the entire city. Israel subsequently re-defined the boundaries of Jerusalem-effectively tripling the city's size-annexed East Jerusalem, and enacted legislation declaring all of greater Jerusalem the united capital of Israel.

In response, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 480 declaring "all legislative measures and actions taken by Israel which have altered or purport to alter character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem . . . are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith."

Security Council Resolution 465, passed in 1980, condemned Israel's annexation of Jerusalem, stating that, "All measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem . . . have no legal validity."

The Israeli government ignored the resolutions and, when peace talks with the Palestinians began in 1993, the two sides agreed to defer Jerusalem's status to the final stage of negotiations.

U.S. policy toward Jerusalem has been less consistent than that of the United Nations. Whereas the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations all treated Israeli annexation as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan took a more vague position on the issue of the holy city and only required that the final status of Jerusalem be decided through negotiations.

President George H. W. Bush took a strong stance against the Israeli annexation. In 1991, Secretary of State James Baker declared that, "we do not recognize Israel's annexation of east Jerusalem or the extension of its municipal boundaries."

President Bill Clinton took a more nuanced approach. He condemned the "unilateral action" and simply declared that "it's up to them [Israelis and Palestinians] now to resolve that problem." At the failed Camp David summit, however, President Clinton endorsed shared sovereignty of the city, with "Jewish" Jerusalem under Israeli control and "Muslim" and "Christian" Jerusalem administered by the Palestinian Authority.

President George W. Bush seemed to endorse the Israeli position in his April 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon where he wrote: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population 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." Nonetheless, since Israel assumed control over the entire city in 1967, the United States has never wavered from its view that Jerusalem's final status will be determined in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations rather than through unilateral actions.

The construction freeze that the Obama administration has demanded includes the cessation of all construction in East Jerusalem. When asked if the freeze applied to East Jerusalem neighborhoods, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly referred to the territory over the pre-1967 armistice line when he said, "we're talking about all the settlement activity, yes, across the green line."

The Shepherd Hotel Controversy

While discussions between Israel and the United States have primarily focused on the settlements in the West Bank, this weekend's disagreement over plans to construct apartments on the site of the Shepherd Hotel forced the Obama administration to address the issue of construction in East Jerusalem.

The Shepherd Hotel sits in Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood that also contains foreign consulates, such as the British embassy, and Israeli government buildings.

Irving Moskowitz, a Miami-based millionaire who has supported numerous Jewish building projects in East Jerusalem, purchased the Shepherd Hotel in 1985. From 1987 to 2002, Moskowitz rented the building out to Israel's border police until Israel granted him permission to construct a housing development.

Moskowitz's goal is not to construct housing for its own sake, but rather to change the facts on the ground and ensure Israeli control of a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly Palestinian. The Palestinians understand Moskowitz's intentions and voiced their protest to the United States. Their fear is that they will lose yet another East Jerusalem neighborhood to Israeli settlers. On Saturday, the Obama administration called Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to the White House to demand that Israel halt the construction project.

President Obama's policy apparently surprised Prime Minister Netanyahu, who told his advisors, "in my conversation with [President] Obama in Washington . . . I told him Jerusalem is not a settlement and it has nothing to do with discussions on a freeze." He elaborated, "during my previous tenure I built thousands of housing units in [East] Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa and I went against the world. Therefore, it is clear that in the present situation I will not cave in."

Prime Minister Netanyahu is no stranger to deliberately changing the focus of dialogue to Jerusalem. In 1996, he diverted attention away from peace talks by opening a tunnel under the Western Wall. The diversion tactic incited an uproar within the Arab community and led to an outbreak of violence that cost the lives of 52 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers. This weekend, Prime Minister Netanyahu employed this strategy to move the focus from West Bank settlements, where he lacks support, to Jerusalem, where he enjoys greater support.

His strategy is evident in his statements. On Sunday, he did not discuss settlements, but rather the Jewish capital: "I would like to re-emphasize that united Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. . . . Our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged; this means-inter alia-that residents of Jerusalem may purchase apartments in all parts of the city." Prime Minister Netanyahu later stated, "I can only describe to myself what would happen if someone would propose that Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris, or Rome."

Unfortunately for Prime Minister Netanyahu, the international community does not regard East Jerusalem's status as similar to these cities, but rather as disputed territory. Moreover, no nation recognizes Israel's expansion of the city to include Palestinian areas that were never part of Jerusalem. In fact, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that Russia, France, Germany and the EU have all condemned the planned Shepherd Hotel construction project.

Netanyahu hopes that by changing the subject to Jerusalem, he can rally more opposition to the Obama administration's policy in the United States and ultimately force President Obama to ease his tough stance on Israel's policy of settlement expansion. So far, his bet has not paid off. On Monday, the State Department reiterated its view that, as far as the United States is concerned, East Jerusalem is in the same category as the West Bank. And so are the settlements a Miami millionaire would build there.