"That Is a Most Unwise Thing"

By William R. Doerner

So says Reagan of a bid to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel

The U.S. maintains 136 embassies around the world, 135 of them in foreign capital cities. The odd nation out: Israel. Jerusalem is the capital, but the American embassy has always been in Tel Aviv, 40 miles northwest, a safe diplomatic distance from the divisive international disputes concerning the status of the Holy City. Now, however, momentum is gathering in Congress for a politically motivated, election-year bill that would require the State Department to move its Tel Aviv embassy to Jerusalem. Last week President Ronald Reagan ventured into this tangled debate with an oblique threat to veto the measure. Said he: "Like the several Presidents before me, I think that that is a most unwise thing."

By heritage and geography, Jerusalem is like no other place in the world. For Jews and many Christians, it is the holiest city; for Muslims, only Mecca and Medina, both in Saudi Arabia, are more sacred. In its 4,000-year history, Jerusalem has been the focus of national and religious wars, from the Roman conquest to the Crusades to the struggle between Arab and Jewish communities during the British mandate of 1919-48. Israel established its modern capital in the western part of the divided city in 1950, two years after the country's founding. During the Six-Day War of 1967, it seized from Jordan the ancient Arab eastern part of the city, which includes the principal religious shrines; four years ago, in a move that was extremely provocative to Arabs and Muslims, the Israelis declared the city reunified as the country's capital.

To American supporters of the U.S. relocation, it is a simple matter of recognizing a 35-year-old fact. Says Democrat Tom Lantos of California, a sponsor of the bill in the House: "It merely faces up to the reality that West Jerusalem is the seat of government of Israel and the place where the U.S. in fact conducts its diplomatic relations with Israel." What it also faces up to--blatantly but effectively--is the desire of many legislators to court votes from the Jewish electorate, which favors the move almost unanimously as a symbolic show of U.S. support for Israel. Both Walter Mondale and Gary Hart demonstrated as much in New York, where they sought to outdo each other in supporting the idea while campaigning for the large Jewish vote in that state's primary. In fact, the embassy question is generating much more heat in the U.S. than in Israel, where it is not a prominent political concern at the moment. Israeli leaders are somewhat bemused by the gamesmanship of U.S. politicians and anxious to avoid the swirl of American electoral politics.

Opponents of the measure, particularly officials of the State Department, regard the debate as demagogic and argue that moving the embassy would be tanta mount to taking sides in the question of the final status of Jerusalem. Israel's Arab neighbors have never relinquished their claims of sovereignty over the sacred city. So volcanic is this dispute that any mention of it was completely omitted from the U.S.-sponsored Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. Said Reagan last week in an interview with the New York Times: "The United States has no right to put itself in a position of trying to lean one way or the other on those areas for negotiation." All of his immediate predecessors agree. Said former President Jimmy Carter on ABC's Nightline: "This would be a symbolic move that would accrue no benefits at all to Israel but would make an almost insurmountable obstacle to any proceeding further toward a peace agreement."

Opponents of the move point out that 13 nations have pulled their embassies out of Jerusalem since the annexation of the eastern part. Only Costa Rica remains.

There is little doubt that setting up a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem could be a costly gesture that would reverberate throughout the Muslim world. "This is not an Arab-Israeli issue," says a State Department official involved in the debate. "It is an Islamic issue. There are people who don't give a damn about the Middle East who care about Jerusalem." The fervor about the status of Jerusalem could disrupt the normal course of U.S. diplomacy in Islamic countries as far removed from the Middle East as Indonesia and Malaysia. Incoming U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Deane Hinton, for example, found to his surprise that it was the most nettlesome issue he faced upon arrival in Islamabad. Says he: "All this damn nonsense about moving our embassy to Jerusalem has the Pakistanis up in arms. They've called me to protest officially that it would be a terrible mistake. They say it would be bad for the U.S., just the same as our giving Jerusalem to the Israelis on a silver platter." The State Department, fearing demonstrations and outbreaks of violence, is considering the withdrawal of U.S. dependents from embassies throughout the Islamic world if the bill should pass.

Proponents seized on this real threat as a kind of dare. Said New York Democrat Daniel Moynihan, who introduced the measure in the Senate: "If the United States can be deterred from taking a normal, legal, everyday act by the threat of mob violence, what kind of a country have we become?" As for the question of Jerusalem's permanent status, advocates point out that the U.S. operates an embassy in East Berlin even though it does not recognize that city as East Germany's rightful capital. Both rebuttals, however, ignore the essential point that the final status of Jerusalem, a matter of global and religious import, should not turn into a domestic political free-for-all.

At week's end the measure had 38 co-sponsors in the Senate, including 14 Republicans, and 215 in the House. There were a few signs that some of its backers were having second thoughts about the precipitate nature of the move; even Moynihan said that he had not been active in lining up support for the measure and would not call it to the floor unless there existed "a clear majority for it." But opponents were still worried about the power of election-year pressures, especially in the House. Said one: "We'd better understand that when we do this we're liable to have very bad relations with a large part of the world." --By William R. Doemer. Reported by Harry Kelly/Jerusalem and Barrett Seaman/Washington

With reporting by Harry Kelly, Barrett Seaman