Obama and Jerusalem: Now and Then

When he appeared before AIPAC on June 4 and said “Let me be clear . . . [Jerusalem] must remain undivided,” Barack Obama was expressing a view he had taken formally, in writing, multiple times, in virtually identical terms, over an eight-year period.

The position had been set forth in his January 2008 response to the American Jewish Committee Election Questionaire, and in his position paper released during his 2000 campaign for Congress.

This past Sunday, Obama told CNN his AIPAC pledge had been misunderstood:  it had “poor phrasing” and careless “syntax.”  He explained that by “undivided” he simply meant no barbed wire between the divisions — a position that Paul Mirengoff at Power Line described as “dishonest, ignorant, or both,” and David Hazony at Contentions noted was ludicrously unrealistic. 

In light of the plain meaning of his AIPAC words and his repeated prior statements to the same effect, Obama’s “poor phrasing” explanation is misleading at best.  There is, however, an even more significant aspect of the CNN interview:  Obama did not simply back out of his commitment to an undivided Jerusalem by defining it away.  Instead, he turned around and endorsed a divided city as the “starting point” for negotiations.  See the column in today’s New York Sun:  “Obama’s Redivided Jerusalem.”

Since 1995, it has been the official policy of the United States that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city.”  P.L. 104-45, Section 3(a)(1).  That policy is implicit in UN Resolution 242 (1967), which the Roadmap designates as the basis for final status negotiations.  On March 12, 1980, the New York Times printed a letter from Arthur J. Goldberg (discussed in this post), who was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. when Resolution 242 was adopted.  Goldberg wrote “to set the record straight”:

Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate. . . . In a number of speeches at the UN in 1967, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after 1948 were intended to be temporary.  This, of course, was particularly true of Jerusalem. . . .  I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable.  In other words, Jerusalem was not to be divided again.  [Emphasis added].

Obama told CNN he was “not trying to predetermine what are essentially final status issues.” By endorsing the division of Jerusalem as the “starting point” for final status negotiations, however, that is precisely what he did. 

He should have stuck to the policy reflected in Resolution 242, the policy expressly set forth in P.L. 104-45, the clear meaning of his prior statements, and his explicit and unambiguous pledge at AIPAC — none of which had any poor phrasing or careless syntax.