House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford (R.Mich.) proposed today that the United States recognize Jerusalem as the “historic and lawful capital of Israel” by moving its embassy there from Tel Aviv. Ford, the first nationally prominent Republican to advocate such a move, said he hoped President Nixon would go to Jerusalem by 1973, Israel’s 25th anniversary, “to dedicate a new United States embassy in that city.” Addressing a meeting of the Zionist Organization of America’s Cleveland Region, the Michigan Congressman stated that he planned to take up his proposal with Secretary of State William P. Rogers.
Ford called it “anachronistic” and “an impediment to a regional peace settlement” for the US to preserve the “fiction” that Jerusalem is not Israel’s capital city. “To continue with the present arrangement might tend to indicate that there is something temporary about the location of Israel’s capital,” he said. “This situation does not encourage the Arabs to translate the present cease-fire arrangements into a permanent and lasting peace.”
At the ZOA meeting, Ford received the Cleveland Region’s Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver Award-a glass etching of the late American Zionist leader-in recognition of Ford’s “friendship and concern for the welfare and security of the State of Israel.” The presentation was made by Conrad J. Morgenstern, a Cleveland attorney who is president of the ZOA region.
Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, Ford said, would demonstrate “that our friendship has reached the phase in which we accept Israel’s right to designate her capital.” “President Nixon set an example by reviewing diplomatic contacts and relations with the Chinese government in Peking,” he said. “We can do no less with a nation with whom we have enjoyed a close friendship in this last quarter century.” He described Jerusalem as a city “precious to all Americans, Christian and Jewish alike, a city that we can very appropriately recognize as a world capital devoted to the ideal of peace.”
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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.
