To all you editorial writers, self-professed Middle East exports, diplomats and others:
1. Trump’s declaration did not destroy the peace process. Pretending it destroys the peace process destroys the peace process.
2. Trump’s declaration did not recognize all of Jerusalem as Israeli.
3. Trump’s declaration did not preclude Jerusalem also being a Palestinian capital one day. (I think it’s a very bad idea, but he never even implied it.)
4. Trump’s declaration didn’t cause terror or violence. People who purposefully misinterpreted Trump’s words incited violence and organized violent demonstrations.
5. The initial violence in the territories after the declaration was directly orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority. (It closed its schools to increase the number of demonstrators.) The riots weren’t spontaneous.
6. Everyone agrees that Jerusalem within the Green Line is Israeli under international law. Israel can do there what any country can do. There was never a shred of legal support for Jerusalem to be considered an international city – because the Arabs rejected the 1947 UNGA resolution that proposed it.
7. No matter whether the world accepts it, Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, because that’s where its government is. A state can declare its capital; no outsider can change that. Trump merely stated the obvious.
8. The idea that Jerusalem must be accepted as the capital of a Palestinian state before it can be accepted as the capital of Israel is wholly arbitrary and purely anti-Israel. It pre-judges the outcome of negotiations, the exact charge falsely given to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
9. Jerusalem has been universally accepted as the capital of the Jewish nation way before Israel was reborn and even before modern Zionism.
10. Earlier this year, Russia recognized pre-1967 Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, today. There is no contradiction between that position and what Trump said. Yet there was no uproar over that recognition.
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