[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 70 (Friday, May 14, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5370-S5371]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    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

[[Page S5371]]

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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