President-elect Trump has held discussions with his transition team about the process of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has made the change a top priority, a senior aide said Monday.
Less than 24 hours after Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat told the New York Times he is optimistic that the incoming Republican president will deliver on his campaign promise to relocate the embassy “sooner rather than later,” Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said Trump has made changing the embassy’s location “a very big priority” in his overall agenda.
“He made that very clear during the campaign … and as president-elect, I’ve heard him repeat it several times privately if not publicly,” Conway told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “It’s something that our great friend in the Middle East would appreciate and it’s something that a lot of Jewish Americans have also expressed their preference for.”
Conway said moving the embassy to Jerusalem would be “an easy thing for [Trump] to do,” despite many of his predecessors promising to do the same but later postponing the move over concerns about interfering with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“People scratch their heads and wonder why it wasn’t done,” Conway said, noting that Trump’s national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn agrees with the president-elect in that his administration should see to it that the embassy move finally happens.
“I’ve talked to Gen. Flynn very recently [and] he said his top three priorities as [national security adviser] will be government reform, and will be peace and security, and also he told me stabilization in the Middle East,” she said.
“You’ve got a [national security adviser] who pinpointed that as one of the top three priorities as he sees it and that goes with what you’re saying about moving the [Israeli] capital” to Jerusalem, she told Hewitt.
Walid Phares, a senior foreign policy adviser to Trump during the campaign told BBC News just after Trump’s victory last month that the billionaire will only move the embassy “under consensus,” though he declined to define what he meant.
Meanwhile, Barkat said that “because I know some of the people and friends around Donald Trump, I believe that it will happen.”
