Senior administration officials said Friday that the lack of high-profile U.S. officials attending the opening ceremony for the new embassy in Jerusalem appears the result of little more than scheduling conflicts.
The officials said the U.S. government was monitoring potential security risks ahead of the Monday celebration, but that the sparsity of high-ranking guests was unrelated.
“I believe it all has to do with scheduling, but I just don’t know their schedules well enough,” said one senior official on a call with reporters. “The president has a lot on his plate and I’m sure he’d love to be there if he could.”
A second senior official said, “I wouldn’t read much into the scheduling,” asserting there will be a “very robust” delegation.
Although he said late last month he may attend, President Trump will now address about 800 guests by video, an official said. Vice President Mike Pence also is missing the event.
A Trump administration delegation will feature Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Various members of Congress also will attend.
Trump announced that he would move the embassy from Tel Aviv in December. Officials initially projected an embassy opening years later, potentially after Trump’s first term in office.
Trump says he saved taxpayers about $999.5 million by vetoing an expensive ground-up construction project in favor of the remodeling of an existing structure that was recommended by Friedman.
Officials on the Friday call said diplomats from other countries weren’t invited to the embassy opening.
Initially, the officials said, about 50 employees will work at the new Jerusalem embassy. More will later transfer from Tel Aviv. A larger embassy facility will be built later.
Friedman, who keeps an apartment in Jerusalem, will move to a new official residence in Jerusalem when it is acquired, an official said.
“Israel is a small country,” the official said. “You can go back and forth every day [from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem]. It’s not an ideal commute, but it’s commutable.”
Officials disputed suggestions that the embassy opening could roil the Mideast, pointing repeatedly to a tweet from Bahrain’s foreign minister supporting Israel’s “right… to defend itself” from Iran. The U.S.-allied Persian Gulf nation is ruled by an authoritarian Sunni monarchy, but its population is Shiite-majority like Iran, which it blames for pro-democracy protests.
“[The tweet] shows you the president is absolutely doing the right thing here. It is not upsetting any regional balance. In fact, it’s his leadership that’s bringing the region together,” one of the officials said.
The other official added: “This is a 50-plus year conflict. Maybe it’s a 500-year conflict, depending on how you gauge it. You can’t measure it in terms of weeks and months any more than you can measure climate change in weeks or months.”
