Monday, December 18, 2017

Covenant With Many - Peace of Jerusalem

US vetoes UN resolution against Trump's Jerusalem decision - AP
The AP reports: "The United States on Monday vetoed a resolution supported by the 14 other U.N. Security Council members that would have required President Donald Trump to rescind his declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel [...] Arab supporters wanted the vote to demonstrate that countries everywhere and even many U.S. allies such as Britain, France and Japan are against Trump’s action. [...] The status of Jerusalem has been a central issue in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Trump’s announcement was widely perceived as taking the side of Israel. It countered an international consensus that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, who claim east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state."

Comment: I find it amazing that an act of political grandstanding can have such far-reaching consequences. They are acting as if Trump did something tangible when all he really did was have a new conference so he could brag to his political base that he kept a campaign promise. That's all that happened. He signed the waiver. The embassy won't move for many years, if ever. But, in the reality distortion field that surrounds Jerusalem, even political PR stunts can take on the appearance of reality and cause mayhem. Seriously, people have died in demonstrations against this. Now they are saying that the U.S. can no longer be the mediator of Mideast peace and Russia is offering to mediate. As I noted before, the most significant result of this action has been to open up the peace-making process to new mediators. That is an incredibly important development.

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