After President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy accordingly, western politicos and commentators heaped contempt on the move and predicted violence and bloodshed in Israel and in the Arab street. Hamas, the Islamic terror group, said the move would “open the gates of hell” and called for a third Intifada. The Palestinian Fatah movement promised three “days of rage,” and there were protests in Amman and Tehran and Cairo and elsewhere.
But the three days of rage turned into about eighteen hours of protests—and that was it. The predictions of widespread violence were wrong.
U.S. officials have said the move to Jerusalem will happen officially on May 14, the seventieth anniversary of Israeli independence. Two days later, the little central American nation of Guatemala will also move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “It is important to be among the first,” Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales said on Monday at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference, “but it is more important to do what’s right.”
Guatemala was one of only nine nations that backed the U.S. embassy move when the U.N. passed a resolution condemning it. The other countries were similarly small players on the global stage: Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Togo, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and of course Israel.
We hear the guffaws of the foreign policy elites in Washington and London and Paris. Guatemala? Honduras? Togo? The alignment of these few little nations with U.S. policy is itself, the elites suggested, an indication of just how outlandish the American policy is.
Well, okay. But 35 nations merely abstained in the U.N. vote, and many of them are both sizeable and influential: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, to name a few. We wonder what would happen if some of these nations also decided to move their embassies to Jerusalem? Perhaps not much, or perhaps some halfhearted protests in middle eastern capitals and some formulaic denunciations from the usual suspects in Turtle Bay. Perhaps not even that.
In any case, there must be few substantive reasons for these nations to keep their embassies 40 miles from what everybody knows full well is the center and capital of the Israeli state. So far from jeopardizing the at-present nonexistent peace process, moving those embassies would help to rid future negotiations of the pernicious delusion that the Palestinians may one day control all of Jerusalem. The only basis on which to negotiate is the truth, and so far the U.S. and Guatemala are the first openly to acknowledge that truth. Others are welcome to follow.
