The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN ISRAEL” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S5370-S5371 on May 14, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
UNITED STATES EMBASSY IN ISRAEL
Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, yesterday, Israel marked 32 years since Jerusalem was united under Israeli control in the 1967 Mideast war. I rise today to strongly urge the President of the United States not to employ the waiver provision in the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, but rather to fulfill the intent of that law by moving our embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel's capital city, Jerusalem.
The United States has diplomatic relations with 184 countries around the world. With only one of those countries--Israel--do we neither recognize the country's designated capital nor have our embassy located in the designated capital. That is as incredible as it is unacceptable. It is not only that Israel is one of our closet and most important allies. Nor is it only the obvious principle that every country has the right to designate its own capital. It is also that there is no other capital city anywhere whose history is more intimately associated than is Jerusalem's with the nation of Israel.
Jerusalem is the only city on earth that is the capital of the same country, inhabited by the same people who speak the same language and worship the same God as they did 3,000 years ago. No other city on earth can make that claim. Three thousand years ago, David, King of Israel, made Jerusalem his capital city and brought the Ark of the Covenant into its gates. Ever since, Jerusalem has been the cultural, spiritual, and religious center of the Jewish people. Twenty-five hundred years ago an anonymous Jewish psalmist living in forced exile wrote the following words: ``By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion . . . If I forget the O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning; may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember thee, If I do not set Jerusalem above my chief joy.''
Jerusalem has been a capital city of an independent country only three times in its history, and all three were under Jewish sovereignty: under the four hundred year rule of the House of Davids, under the restored Jewish commonwealth following the period of Babylonian exile (586-536 BC), and now under the reborn State of Israel. Jerusalem has been the capital of no other independent state, nor of any other people. It has had a continuous Jewish presence for three thousand years, and for the last hundred and fifty years, Jews have been the largest single part of its population.
In 1947, The United Nations General Assembly passed the Partition Resolution for Palestine to partition what is today Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza into what was supposed to become a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state. In the resolution, Jerusalem was to have been an international city under UN auspices. The Jewish community of Palestine accepted the partition proposal but the Arab community, along with the rest of the Arab world, refused. Instead, Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state intent on destroying it--a de facto rendering the Partition Resolution null and void.
Nevertheless, the United States established its embassy in Tel Aviv, where it sits to this day. But Jerusalem is Israel's capital: it is the seat of its government, its parliament, its supreme court. The President and Prime Minister reside there. Our ambassador travels daily from Tel Aviv to meetings with Israeli government officials in Jerusalem. All major political parties in Israel agree, moreover, that Jerusalem will remain Israel's undivided capital.
The United States Congress also agrees. Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation in 1995 that contained an official statement of US policy on Jerusalem: that it should remain united and be recognized as Israel's capital, and that our embassy should be located there by the end of May, 1999. If the embassy were not located in Jerusalem by that date, 50 percent of the State Department's budget for buildings and maintenance abroad would be withheld unless the President issued a national security waiver. That is the waiver which the President now considers issuing. I strongly believe that he should not do so, that instead he should do what is right by recognizing that Jerusalem is Israel's capital.
There are those who timidly argue that to do what is right will damage the peace process. How can that be possible? Is it not more harmful to fuel unrealizable expectations by pretending that Jerusalem is not Israel's capital or that it might someday be redivided? Would it not be better simply to finally do what we should have done fifty years ago by recognizing the only city that could ever be. Israel's capital, the one city that has always been Israel's capital, the eternal city of Jerusalem?
President Clinton stated when he was running for office on June 30, 1992 the following: ``Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, . . . Jerusalem is still the capital of Israel, and must remain an undivided city accessible to all.'' He was right then, and he has the chance to do right now.
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