Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with Pope Francis in Rome this past week. The topic of the meeting wasn’t the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, nor Erdogan’s human rights abuses in Turkey. It was Erdogan’s and the Vatican’s shared objection to the United State moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
It is hard to see how Pope Francis and Erdogan have any standing in the matter. Israel is a sovereign nation; it gets to choose its capital like every other country. And what foreign entity gets to say where the U.S. embassy should be? This is especially aggravating given the fact that having the American embassy in Jerusalem is U.S. law according to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995.
Why is the embassy not already in Jerusalem in line with a 20-year-old law? It’s because the law states the embassy move can be put off for six months at a time as long as the president “determines and reports to congress in advance that such suspension is necessary to protect the national security of the United States.”
This loophole allowed Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama to circumvent the move for twenty years, even though both presidents Bush and Clinton campaigned for it. Donald Trump, on the other hand, made relocating our embassy to Israel’s capital a campaign issue, and he’s acting on it.
It is hard to imagine how moving the American embassy could be a genuine threat to U.S. national security. The inaction was another shameful bow to Arab anti-Jewish sentiments and a slight to Israel’s sovereignty.
