Why the US cannot — and will not — move its embassy in Israel

During the 2016 presidential elections, Republican candidate Donald Trump, promised that once he was elected he would move the U.S. embassy in Israel, currently in Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem. In doing so, he was echoing a theme that has been played out in the previous six presidential elections.

The issue of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem has been a recurring theme in American politics for the better part of 30 years. Candidates propose the move in the belief that it will curry support among Jewish-American voters. In reality, it is an issue that divides the Jewish-American community in the U.S. Moreover, its supporters extend well beyond Jewish-Americans to include a significant number of evangelical Christians and political conservatives.

{mosads}Implicit in such a move would be the formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. No other country has ever recognized the designation of either West Jerusalem or, after 1980, the entire city as the capital of Israel. The United Nations Security Council has passed a total of seven resolutions, starting with U.N. Resolution 478 in 1980, declaring Israel’s annexation of both West and East Jerusalem and its declaration of Jerusalem as the country’s capital contravened international law.

Both the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations were opposed to moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. As candidates for the presidency, however, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald J. Trump all pledged to move the U.S. embassy.

In 1995, the U.S. Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act directing the transfer of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by no later than May 31, 1999. All three recent presidents, Clinton, Bush and Obama, have refused to implement the act on the basis that it infringed upon the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy.

White House at “very beginning” of talks to move U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/mtFrjBPFyo

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 23, 2017

Over the last two decades, the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the defining axis around which Mideast politics revolves has steadily diminished. Instead, the rise of Iranian power and influence; its ongoing efforts to mobilize Shiite groups to advance its own foreign policy goals; as well as its aggressive pursuit of a nuclear capability and its intent to emerge as a regional hegemonic power in the Middle East, has upended Middle East politics. In the process, it has created a new axis of conflict that is rapidly reorganizing the region’s political alignments.

The spread of Iranian influence within the Shiite communities across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza has created an “Iranian arc of influence” across the northern tier of the Mideast. In the meantime, and even more worrisome to Riyadh and its Gulf allies, Tehran’s support for the Houthi rebels in Syria and for the sizable Shiite populations in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, a major oil producing region, as well as along the western flank of the Persian Gulf, threatens to create a second Iranian “arc of influence” that would surround the Sunni governments of the Arabian Peninsula.

Just as in the Cold War, Russia and the United States are aligning themselves along opposite sides of the Iranian-Saudi/Shiite-Sunni fault line. Moscow has emerged as a strong supporter of Tehran and its “Shiite agenda,” while Washington, the ambivalence under the Obama administration notwithstanding, is the principal supporter of the Sunni regimes.

Concurrently, Israel has quietly strengthened its relations with many of the Sunni Arab governments that have traditionally — at least publicly — been officially opposed to the continued existence of the Israeli state. The thaw became noticeable in 2006, when both Cairo and Riyadh quietly sided with Israel in its conflict with Hezbollah in what came to be called the July War or the Second Lebanon War. The Sunni governments see Hezbollah as little more than an Iranian Shiite proxy quick to do Tehran’s bidding and a growing threat to the region’s political stability.

The recent agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia for the transfer of the islands of Tiran and Sanafi is symptomatic of this new thaw. It underscores an unprecedented development whose long-range significance has been missed by Western media. The two islands were originally controlled by Saudi Arabia. They sit at the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea, and dominate the narrow channel connecting the two bodies of water — thus they are critical to controlling it.

Fearing that the islands would be seized by Israel, the Saudis turned over the islands to Egypt in 1950. Israel did subsequently seize the islands in the 1956 war that accompanied the Suez crisis and again in 1967, during the six-day war. The islands were returned to Egypt, along with the Sinai Peninsula, under the Camp David Accords.

The fact that the Saudis now want the islands back is a powerful statement that they see the outbreak of renewed conflict between Israel and Egypt as virtually inconceivable. That doesn’t mean that the historic enmity between Israel and its Arab neighbors has gone away. Far from it — it is still very much alive. It simply means that both sides realize that any renewed conflict is in neither of their interest and that Iran poses a larger threat to their mutual security.

PLO will revoke its recognition of Israel if US moves its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, chief negotiator says https://t.co/ZdnOC1rWVE pic.twitter.com/SDyQXvs4FN

— CNN (@CNN) January 27, 2017

In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, Tehran sought to craft an anti-Israeli/pro-Palestinian policy as a vehicle to attain a position of leadership in the Middle East. This position was presented as an issue that could rally both Shiites and Sunnis under Iranian leadership, and was a radical departure from the past.

Pre-revolution Iran had enjoyed close and mutually supportive relations with Israel. Iran had for many years been Israel’s principal supplier of crude oil. Until then, Shiite communities, while generally supportive of the Palestinian cause, had not demonstrated the virulent, anti-Israeli vitriol that would eventually come to characterize Iran’s position. Tehran’s gambit failed. Notwithstanding the enmity between Israelis and Arabs, it was trumped by the even longer standing, historic enmity and distrust between Arabs and Persians.

The de facto alliance between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors is a tenuous one. It is not an alignment that would be supported by Arab public opinion. Decades of anti-Israel propaganda do not easily disappear, certainly not overnight. It is in this context that a move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem must be evaluated. Such an announcement would precipitate widespread public demonstrations throughout the Middle East and force Sunni governments to denounce both Israel and the United States, ostensibly two of their most important allies against Iran.

The move would undermine the developing Israeli-Sunni Arab alignment and could pressure Arab governments to craft a more forceful response to placate the Arab street. This is the reason that Arab governments are publicly urging Washington to refrain from moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Privately, the Israeli military and intelligence community is telling Washington the same thing. The only country to benefit from such a development would be Iran.

Joseph V. Micallef is managing editor of Antioch Press and a regular columnist for Military.com. He’s been a commentator for Fox News, Fox News Radio and CNN and has spoken extensively on military and international affairs around the world, including the Institute of Strategic Studies in London and the NATO Defense College in Rome.

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.