Jerusalem

Donald Trump has announced that the United States will officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (where the Israelis already have their seat of government) and move the U.S embassy there from Tel Aviv.  Trump's rationale - now there are two words you don't normally put together - is that Israel has the right to put its capital in the city of its choice "like every other sovereign nation" and that the Israelis and the Palestinians will be spurred to work out a peace agreement on that pretext.  Acknowledging the idea of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and theoretically forcing the Israelis and the Palestinians to go back to negotiations and decide the final status of Jerusalem in a two-state solution, Trump thus concludes, is "a necessary condition for achieving peace."

Geez, even his decision to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement on climate change made more sense. 

This doesn't even make good nonsense.  Jerusalem is a holy city that has been held dear by the three great religions of the Indo-European world - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  The Jews claim it as their citadel, the place where they established their civilization, but so do the Christians for the arrival of Jesus in the city to celebrate Passover and His subsequent crucifixion and resurrection.  Muslims consider it the third holiest city in their faith, after Mecca and Medina; it was in Jerusalem where the Prophet Muhammad spoke to God and where the act of turning to Mecca for prayers was established.  Jerusalem is where the Semites and the Canaanites may have settled, but it has become a holy place for millions of people in the region and billions of people around the world.  It belongs to the children of Israel, yes, but anyone raised in the Islamic or Judeo-Christian tradition is a child of Israel. 

The Palestinians have lived in Jerusalem for centuries through the years of imperial rule by Arabs and Turks, and their claim to the city has long been respected, if not exactly endorsed, by the United States until Trump, who's a religious scholar like I'm a jet pilot, blew it up.  I admit that I myself am not much of a religious scholar, either.)  In 1995, Congress passed an advisory act recognizing that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, But Presidents Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Obama waived a final decision on it to help the peace process move along and to conform with American security interests.  Trump's declaration that the U.S. Embassy will be moved to Jerusalem takes away any incentive by the Israelis to negotiate with the Palestinians in good faith with an unbiased broker to facilitate the peace process.  The United States just put the American thumb down hard on the scales for the Israelis.

A friend of mine alerted me to this reasonable proposal that was first offered in 1948, when Israel became the Jewish state in and the Palestinians were offered a state but turned down the offer because the Palestinians were at odds with the Jews for reasons that boiled down to issues land and property in the partitioning of the region.  The idea was the concept of corpus separatum - Latin for "separate body," the proposal to make Jerusalem a city free of national identity and open to all.  It was an idea not unlike isolating Washington, D.C. in its own federal district and making it a city of all the states in the Union, and even though the separation of Washington hasn't worked out very well,  thanks to tensions between the federal government and the locals, the internationalization of Jerusalem and taking the politics out of its fate makes perfect sense.  The next best thing, of course, would be to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Israelis in the west and the Palestinians in the east.  Instead you have Trump, an unlettered President of a country too young to appreciate the specialness and the complexity of a city that goes back four thousand years, taking a hard line on an unfair position in defiance to everyone in Europe and the Middle East, satisfying only . . . Israel.

I think he's doing this to stir up and split the Democratic-leaning Jewish vote.  But he's jeopardizing not only the peace in the region but in the world, as his decision only serves to rile up Islamic extremists and anger regional powers - regional powers where, incidentally, so much of the world's oil is.

Oh yeah, before Ajit Pai lets ISPs silence me, I can't help but mention that World War II was started over a dispute over the future of Danzig, the free Baltic port city of German and Polish residents that Poland had a right to use for an outlet to the sea, which had caused tension with Germany.  The Third Reich used Danzig as an excuse to invade Poland, and the first shot in the war's European theater was fired from a Kriegsmarine battleship in Danzig's harbor.  And Danzig - now the Polish city of Gdańsk - was purely an issue of economic power. Jerusalem is a far, far more sensitive case. But don't expect Trump to get that.