News Analysis: Congress’ Move on Embassy Unlikely to Affect Peace Process

This week’s congressional passage of a bill to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is unlikely to have any immediate impact on the Israeli- Palestinian peace process.

Opponents of the legislation within the Clinton Administration – and within the Israeli government – had warned during recent months that passage of the bill might trigger vigorous opposition within the Palestinian community and within the wider Arab world. They warned that it could throw the entire peace process into turmoil.

In all the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, there is no hotter hot-button issue than the future of Jerusalem.

Israel annexed eastern Jerusalem soon after the 1967 Six-Day War and claims the entire city as its capital. The Palestinians want eastern Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, but say they oppose redividing the city.

The issue is so delicate that the framers of the Declaration of Principles signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in September 1993 postponed discussion of the future of the holy city until the final-status talks, which are slated to start in May 1996.

These trepidations fueled controversy around the bill, generating much heat within the American political arena, within the U.S. Jewish community and between the Israeli government and its friends in Washington.

But when the legislation to move the embassy by May 1999 was overwhelmingly approved – by a 93-5 vote in the Senate and a 374-37 vote in the House – there were no demonstrations by Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority did not publish a formal condemnation of the law, as had been expected.

But Faisal Husseini, the PLO’s top official in Jerusalem did speak out against the move, saying that it could harm Israeli-Arab peace efforts.

He told a television interviewer that the United States had promised the Palestinians that it would not take any steps that could affect the final status of Jerusalem.

Despite the dire warnings, however, implementation of the recently signed accord extending Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank continued.

In Jenin, Palestinians gathered with flags and cheers as Israel began its first scheduled transfer of authority in the West Bank town.

And in the wider Arab world, preparations for next week’s regional economic conference in Amman, Jordan, in which Israel is expected to play a significant role, are moving full steam ahead.

The muted outcry was undoubtedly due, in part, to significant changes in the bill from earlier drafts, the result of intensive politicking that surrounded it since its introduction earlier this year.

A version of the bill that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) submitted in May would have required groundbreaking on the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, next year.

But the final version included no groundbreaking date and said only that the embassy transfer must happen by May 1999.

Even more significantly, the approved legislation grants a waiver to the president, allowing him to postpone the transfer for six-month intervals if he deems it necessary to protect American national security interests.

By giving the president the last word on implementation, the Republican-led Congress in effect reversed its initial intent to force the bill down President Clinton’s throat. Clinton is still clearly upset by the legislation, as evidenced by an unusually harsh attack on the congressional action following the vote.

Clinton pledged to use the waiver powers to indefinitely postpone the move until he is certain the move would avoid damaging the peace process.

Many congressional Republicans – and Democrats – were confident of winning kudos from American Jews for supporting the tougher, earlier versions of the bill.

But they were nonplused to find Israel lobbying behind the scenes against those versions, and concurring with the administration’s view that it could jeopardize the peace process.

But for all the fears that passage of the embassy bill could thoroughly upend the peace process, the Palestinian leadership appears ill-disposed at this time to create a crisis over the bill.

For one thing, PLO leader Yasser Arafat knows that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and officials of his government had worked behind the scenes to achieve the final, more moderate form of the bill.

For another, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from six West Bank towns, a move call for under the recently signed agreement for extending West Bank autonomy, is already beginning to move into high gear.

The Palestinian leadership has little taste for a major confrontation over the Jerusalem issue now. This could produce a slowdown or cessation of the peace process, which, after months of delays, is finally moving at a satisfactory pace for the Palestinians.

On Wednesday, an advance party of Palestinian police officers arrived in Jenin, marking the start of the transfer of authority there. Similar transfers are scheduled to occur in the West Bank towns of Tulkarm, Kalkilya, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah before the year’s end.

But Wednesday’s “liberation” celebration, replete with Palestinian flags, is small potatoes compared to the dramatic events that Arafat and his team are planning for Christmas Eve in Bethlehem.

Before an audience of dignitaries and media crews from around the world, the Palestinian leader proposes to take possession of the city – which is barely a stone’s throw from Jerusalem.

By then, he will already be ensconced in Ramallah, just to the north of Jerusalem, which will effectively become the Palestinian capital.

And in January, the Palestinians plan to hold their elections throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and immediately thereafter inaugurate their elected leaders.

The Palestinians are not anxious to risk any setbacks to this frenetic timetable by engaging now in a new war of words over Jerusalem, brought on by a largely symbolic American law that is at least four years away from implementation.

This is not to say, of course, that Jerusalem has ceased to be the sensitive issue that it always was. The future of this holy city is still a politically explosive question – on both sides of the conflict.

On Tuesday, for example, Economics Minister Yossi Beilin vehemently denied a front-page report in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz that he had raised the possibility during a public appearance Saturday of some form of shared sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Beilin was quoted as saying, “In return for their recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the 170,000 Palestinian residents of the city should receive some form of self-governing boroughs and Palestinian sovereignty of one kind or another.”

But Beilin later flatly denied that he had spoken of sovereignty – though he conceded that he favors former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek’s 1988 proposal for dividing the city into boroughs, all of which would be under Israeli sovereignty.

Arafat, meanwhile, has recently referred on more than one occasion to the situation in Rome, where the sovereign state of the Vatican nestles within the capital of Italy.

Seasoned observers say this analogy could be significant when cited by Arafat, because it is similarly cited – in private – by some Israeli policy-makers as offering a basis for a solution to the Jerusalem question.

These observers recall that the late Moshe Dayan is said to have contemplated the idea of the Temple Mount becoming an extra-territorial Arab or Muslim enclave, under a separate flag.