Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s office warned Friday of the potential destructive effects if US President Donald Trump recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move they say would deny their claim to East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
“The American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel destroys the peace process,” Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a statement to AFP.
“The American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the American embassy to Jerusalem involves the same level of danger to the future of the peace process and pushes the region into instability,” he said.
The warning comes as Trump is due to decide by Monday on whether to move his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed holy city.
Reports emerged on Friday that Trump could again delay moving the embassy but recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and fiercely oppose any changes that could be regarded as legitimizing Israel’s control over East Jerusalem, which it captured in the 1967 Six Day War.
Without referring to Trump by name, Abu Rudeineh said any just solution in the Middle East required recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state.
“East Jerusalem, with its holy places, is the beginning and the end of any solution and any project that saves the region from destruction,” he said in an earlier statement on the official Wafa news agency.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem and claims all of Jerusalem as its undivided eternal capital.
This has not been recognized by the international community. No countries currently have their embassies in Jerusalem, instead keeping them in the Israeli commercial capital Tel Aviv.
Trump is due to decide by Monday on whether to renew a six-month waiver on moving the embassy. He pledged during his campaign to move the embassy to Jerusalem but renewed the waiver in May.
The US leader has said he wants to relaunch frozen peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in search of the “ultimate deal”
Any major shift in US policy would make that goal more difficult to achieve, Middle East analysts say.
Defying longstanding American policy, US President Donald Trump will give a speech Wednesday recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, according to an Axios report on Friday.
A White House spokesman, contacted by The Times of Israel on Friday afternoon, would not confirm the story. “The president has always said it is a matter of when, not if,” the official said. “The president is still considering options and we have nothing to announce.”
The Axios report cited two sources with direct knowledge of Trump’s intentions.
Multiple reports surfaced this week that the president would for the second time waive a congressional mandate requiring the US embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but that he would take the dramatic step of formally recognizing the holy city as Israel’s capital.
An Israeli television report on Wednesday, for instance, said that the Israeli government considered it extremely likely that Trump would declare in the next few days that he recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and that he is instructing his officials to prepare to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. The White House rejected that report as “premature.”
On Tuesday, US Vice President Mike Pence said Trump “is actively considering when and how to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” Pence spoke at a gathering of UN ambassadors, diplomats and Jewish leaders at an event in New York commemorating the 70th anniversary of the UN vote for partition of Palestine, which led to the creation of the State of Israel.
Declaring Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would be a highly controversial move, with the potential to spark unrest in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were contacting embassies in the region warning them to prepare for the possibility of violent protests.
A presidential declaration could risk producing an angry response from the Palestinians and other Arab allies, like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, just as the Trump White House is preparing to move forward with its attempts to broker a Mideast peace accord.
Israel says Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish state, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
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