Campaigning in 2008, Obama promised that Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided
Any negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority “must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state with secure, recognized, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.”
Thus spoke Barack Obama before the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in 2008 when he was campaigning for the presidency. But soon after he assumed the presidency, that promise, like so many others, was broken. President Obama and his State Department refuse to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and appear to favor East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
The Obama administration is now waffling on the identity of Israel as a Jewish state. In March, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that Israel is wrong to demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state.
And the State Department will not even allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on passports. That policy is now being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court.
SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW JERUSALEM BIRHTPLACE LAW
by Lawrence Hurley
Thomson/Reuters
April 21, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to weigh the constitutionality of a U.S. law that was designed to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem - the historic holy city claimed by Israelis and Palestinians - to have Israel listed as their birthplace on passports.
The case concerns a long-standing U.S. foreign policy that the president - and not Congress - has sole authority to state who controls Jerusalem. Seeking to remain neutral on the hotly contested issue, the U.S. State Department allows passports to name Jerusalem as a place of birth, but no country name is included.
The State Department, which issues passports and reports to the president, has declined to enforce the law passed by Congress in 2002, saying it violated the separation of executive and legislative powers laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
In 2003, Ari and Naomi Zivotofsky, the parents of U.S. citizen Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born in Jerusalem in 2002, filed a lawsuit seeking to enforce the law. They would like their son's passport to say he was born in Israel.
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, U.S. presidents have declined to state a position on the status of Jerusalem, leaving it as one of the thorniest issues to be resolved in possible future Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
When Republican President George W. Bush signed the 2002 law, he said that if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, it would "impermissibly interfere" with the president's authority to speak for the country on international affairs.
The issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 on the preliminary question of whether it was so political that it did not belong in the courts. The high court ruled 8-1 that the case could proceed, setting up Tuesday's ruling.
An estimated 50,000 American citizens were born in Jerusalem and could have used the law, if it were enforced, to list Israel as their birthplace.
While Israel calls Jerusalem its capital, few other countries accept that status. Most, including the United States, maintain their embassies to Israel in Tel Aviv. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in a 1967 war, as capital of the state they aim to establish alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Oral arguments and a decision are due in the court's next term, which begins in October and ends in June 2015.
The case is Zivotofsky v. Kerry, U.S. Supreme Court, 13-628.
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