August 7, 2008

Here’s a bipartisan request: Both candidates should stop playing games with Jerusalem.

John McCain has promised, more than once, that if elected he would move the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as soon as he took office. It’s a heady pledge, but empty: Like Presidents Bush and Clinton before him, McCain knows that the embassy promise is an applause line. Come inauguration day, presidents have a way of avoiding the issue, and signing waiver after waiver until “the time is right.” Successive Israeli governments have not pushed for the embassy’s relocation, and candidates shouldn’t either.

Barack Obama made his own empty promise on Jerusalem when he told AIPAC that “it must remain undivided.” But like the embassy promise, that’s just pandering. Obama quickly had to retract his remark, acknowledging that the status of Jerusalem “is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties.” Few true friends of Israel would ask a president to override such negotiations by imposing their own map of Jerusalem.

In truth, both candidates are close on the Jerusalem issue, reflecting a consensus within the Bush administration, Congress, and Israel’s government itself. Namely, all consider Jerusalem the capital of Israel, whose ultimate shape remains an issue to be negotiated by the parties involved. The president’s role, they agree, is to support Israelis and Palestinians when they seek to resolve this most painful of all “final status issues.”

If there are nuances in the candidates’ positions, we’re eager to hear them. But there’s nothing nuanced about an empty promise.

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