Reality Check: Bush in Jerusalem
From my apartment in Jerusalem, one can see the ancient hills and bustling neighborhoods of a city 5,000 years in the making. Today the city has 700,000 inhabitants, is building a light-rail system, and is bracing for a traffic nightmare as President George Bush is about to arrive for a three-day official visit beginning tomorrow. Most Jerusalemites are right now gathering information about road closures, wondering how exactly kids are supposed to get to school.
I live in the neighborhood of Ramot, in Jerusalem’s northwestern reaches. The Green Line, marking Israel’s pre-1967 border, runs somewhere through Ramot, though nobody who lives here could tell you just where. It is a neighborhood like any other in a city like any other, with schools, bus lines, apartment buildings, and commerce. In Jerusalem, practically speaking, there is no Green Line, and there has not been one for decades.
So it is hard to relate to Condoleezza Rice’s startling statement that as far as the U.S. is concerned, "the United States doesn’t make a distinction" between building that goes on in Jerusalem’s eastern quarters and that of West Bank settlements. In what looks like a marked shift in U.S. policy in response to the development of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, Rice has revived the Green Line as a measure of what parts of Jerusalem can, or cannot, develop.
The U.S. government is exceptionally friendly to Israel—yet in the land of the State Department, there are so many formal anachronisms, offensive criteria, and unrealistic definitions, that one wonders what reality the U.S.’s official policies are meant to describe. Jerusalem is Israel’s capital: Its legislature, executive offices, and Supreme Court are all located there, and they have been since 1949—fully twenty years before Israel captured eastern Jerusalem, before anyone ever heard of "West Bank settlements." Yet the State Department does not recognize this. The embassy is in Tel-Aviv. Children of Americans born in Israel are entitled to U.S. citizenship; but if they happen to live in any part of Jerusalem—including Western Jerusalem—the country of their birth is listed in American documents as, simply, "Jerusalem." The U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, moreover, is not formally subordinate to the embassy in Tel-Aviv, but runs its own operation, and is listed on the State Department’s website as not belonging to any country. The consulate’s website does not even have a link to that of the embassy in Tel-Aviv; it does, however, advertise cultural programs meant "to bring American performing arts and exhibits to the West Bank/Jerusalem as a valuable means of strengthening ties and increasing mutual understanding between the United States and the Palestinian people."
The reality is that although a significant minority of Jerusalem’s residents are Arab, the great majority are Jewish Israelis. It is Israel’s biggest city in terms of both population and area. And when Bush’s motorcade travels here tomorrow, the flags that line the streets, alongside the American flag, will be those of the Jewish state. What country, do you suppose, will he think he’s in?
