The United States decision not to move its embassy in Israel into Jerusalem was made as soon as the Israeli government transferred its Foreign Ministry to the Israeli capital in 1953.
This is shown in Vol. V of the “Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954” which the State Department made public today. While Vol. V deals with Western European security, the discussion on the U.S. Embassy comes at the end of an account of a meeting July 16, 1953 between Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and British Acting Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury.
Dulles noted that the U.S. position was similar to that of the British now that the Israeli Foreign Office had been moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. “We do not intend to move our embassy to Jerusalem and we will probably wait for Israeli officials to come to our embassy rather than send embassy representatives to Jerusalem for the conduct of business,” the State Department account reported. “He (Dulles) said, after all we were considerably more important to them than they to us. Lord Salisbury made no particular comment except to indicate that the British also did not plan to move their embassy.”
While the U.S. continues to maintain its embassy in Tel Aviv, U.S. officials do go to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli officials, but refuse to go to official offices in East Jerusalem.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
